Crisis Of The House Divided An Interpretation Of The Issues In The Lincoln Douglas Debates

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Crisis of the hOufie divided

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CRISIS OF THE HOUSE DIVIDED

CRISIS OF

THE HOUSE

DIVIDED

An Interpretation

of the Issues in

the Lincoln-Douglas

Debates

HARRY V. JAFFA

Doubkday b Company, Inc., Garden City, New Yodfc
'959

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 59^0671
Copyright 1959 ty Harry V. Jaffa

Ml Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America
First Edition

To my Father and Mother

Acknowledgments

Two foundations contributed to the research and writing of this
book. I was recipient of a Faculty Fellowship from the Fund for
the Advancement of Education (Ford Foundation) in 1952-53,
and of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, under its program
in legal and political philosophy, during 1956-57. By the en-
lightened practices of these great foundations, they have had no
prior knowledge of the results of my studies and can, therefore,
have no responsibility for them.

I would like to express my gratitude to Mrs. James G. Randall
for permission to quote from a letter by her husband to the author,
and to the following publishers for permission to quote from books
bearing their imprint: Dodd, Mead and Company; Harper and
Brothers; Houghton Mifflin Company; Alfred A. Knopf; Prince-
ton University Press; Rutgers University Press; Charles Scribner's
Sons; University of Kentucky Press; University of New Mexico
Press.

Preface

Tms volume is the first in what it is hopedwill be a two-part
study of Lincoln's political philosophy. Corresponding to Crisis of
the House Divided would be (inevitably) A New Birth of
Freedom. I would not so rashly give the name of a book not yet
written had it had not been a convenient symbol of my conception
of the axis upon which Lincoln's career and thought turned an
axis constituted by the House Divided speech and the Gettysburg
Address.

Although it belongs to a larger whole, the present work is in-
tended to have a unity of its own. I have attempted a thorough
explication of the political principles by which Lincoln was guided
from his re-entry into politics in 1854 until and through the Senate
campaign against Douglas in 1858. To understand these princi-
ples, however, I have found it necessary to interpret the great
occasional speeches of his early Whig period. This I have done
in Part III, wherein I tacitly reject the prevailing view of Lincoln's
slow growth to maturity: it is my conviction that he was extraordi-
narily precocious but that part of that precocity consisted in the
self-control that compelled a supremely ambitious man to be a
political follower when leadership could be seized only by irre-
sponsibility. I have not, however except by implication dealt
with Lincoln's position on political questions, as distinct from po-
litical principles, during his Whig period. Recent historiography
has dealt harshly with him because of his partisan stand, both on
internal improvements and on the Mexican War. The principles
of this historiography are virtually identical with that revisionism
which condemns him so bitterly for his opposition to Douglas in
(and before) 1858. This latter condemnation is the subject of the
critique with which this book begins and ends; and it is my hope,
in still another study, to discuss critically the practical policies of
Henry Clay's follower, as I have done those of the Republican
leader.

1O PREFACE

Lincoln was elected to the presidency upon the issues and,
largely, upon the speeches of the 1858 campaign. Although the
secession crisis, as distinct from that concerning slavery in the
territories, dominated the period after 1858, there is no sharp
cleavage between the two. I have attempted to express herein
the fall meaning only of Lincoln's debate with Douglas from 1854
to 1858, yet I have not hesitated to borrow occasionally from
Lincoln's 1859 and 1860 speeches when it was felt that such
borrowing clarified the meaning of what he had said earlier. No
endeavor has been made, however, to interpret with equal fullness
that final phase of the debate between Lincoln and Douglas which
merges into the election of 1860 and the secession crisis. This, I
feel, belongs properly to the treatment of the war years.

The crisis of the house divided was the spiritual crisis which
preceded secession and war. It is the thesis of this volume that,
had not Lincoln challenged Douglas in 1858, there would proba-
bly have been no subsequent crisis, or at least none of the same
nature. In 1858, by effectively destroying Douglas as the leader
of a national political coalition, by dividing him both from the
Republicans and from the South, Lincoln made morally certain
that the nation would be constitutionally committed to his view
of national political responsibility, a view which he well knew
most of the South believed incompatible with its dearest interests.
The crisis of the war years, with all its agony and possibility of
failure, was yet in a profound sense less critical than the moment
in which the commitment which produced it was being debated.
The two crises differed as the defense of something differs from
the decision to defend it. Or, to use the familiar metaphor which
dominated Lincoln's own vision of America's experience, they dif-
fered as the Passion differed from the Temptation in the
Wilderness. This study is meant to record, not without suggesting
something of its passion, Lincoln's conception of the intellectual
content of that moment of deliberation when the nation, as he
believed, was tempted to abandon its "ancient faith."

Since Lincoln's thought emerges, in considerable measure, in
dialectical fashion from the context of his continuing debate with
Douglas, it can be understood only in the light of the contrasting
policies and principles of his doughty antagonist. I have therefore
attempted to re-create as fully as possible the moral and political
horizon of the Little Giant. Douglas was a gallant as well as a

PREFACE 11

powerful opponent, and he was a great American. If he was a
lesser man than Lincoln it was because, at a moment when
national purposes were confused and national identity obscured,
patriotism was not enough. Yet I have sought to describe the large
measure of consistency and of dignity that I believe Douglas's
measures genuinely possessed. This, however, required a some-
what different kind of effort than did the interpretation of the
fundamentals of Lincoln's thought. Douglas never left any record
of reflections upon the issues raised by the whole American ex-
periment in free government (the Harpers essay is only an appar-
ent exception), such as Lincoln did in his earlier years, in the
Lyceum and Temperance addresses, and in his Gettysburg and
Second Inaugural addresses later. To describe convincingly the
larger meaning of Douglas's statesmanship in his encounter with
Lincoln, it has been necessary to elucidate his policy from a de-
tailed review of his tactical maneuvers in dealing with slavery in
the territories, from the Texas annexation resolutions in 1845 until
the Senate report accompanying the revised Nebraska bill in
January 1854. This I have done in Chapters V through VIII,
wherein I also advance and defend the theory that the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise was forced upon Douglas against his
own intention. It is in the light of this theory that I have passed
over, in charitable silence, those utterly meretricious arguments
with which Douglas specifically vindicated the repeal.

It has been a problem, for which I crave the reader's indulgence,
to know how to draw the line between padding the text with
historical information and unwarrantably assuming a knowledge
of the facts needed to comprehend the progress of the argument
of this book. Because of the demands made by much of the reason-
ing, I have generally resolved my doubts by omitting anything
that would, in my judgment, lengthen the already difficult span
between evidence and inference, between premises and conclu-
sions. In Appendix I, I have put in concise form the most im-
portant historical facts upon which this study rests and which are
not fully explained in the text. I hope it will be adequate for
those who have not recently read any general history of the first
fourscore years of the Republic.

"Silence,* our poet tells us, "is the perfectest herald of joy."
And little would I understand of what I owe to others were I

12 PREFACE

to try to say how great my obligations are. Lest silence be misin-
terpretednot, however, by those to whom my debts are due let
me mention, first of all, Professor Leo Strauss of the University of
Chicago, who directed my graduate studies from 1944 to 1949 at
the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New
School for Social Research. He was and is my teacher, in a sense
now archaic but not less vital for being old. The only limits of
the scholar's profit have been his own capacity.

Professor Joseph Cropsey, also of the University of Chicago,
would have written a better book on these themes had I not pre-
empted them. I only add that the offices of friendship have not
been merely negative and that he has fulfilled them in overflow-
ing measure.

I owe much to the enthusiastic interest of Professors Allan
Bloom of the University of Chicago and Martin Diamond,
formerly of Chicago, now of Claremont Men's College. Frequent
discussions with these gentlemen during the year I was working
on this book in Chicago were invaluable in stimulating and clarify-
ing my thoughts.

My wife typed this, as she has all my manuscripts. Her tactful
suggestions, because of their unobtrusiveness, have probably had
a more pervasive influence than I am aware of. The foregoing,
however, have been the least of her contributions, although they
are not little. On the frontiers of scholarship, the work of the
pioneer wife continues, abating neither in hardship nor dignity.

Finally, I would speak of those to whom this book is dedicated.
It was many years after I first borrowed Lincoln books from the
Yale library for my father that I began to read them myself. The
exemplary method, if sometimes slow, is the surest. And if, after
my father, I became a Lincolnophile, so was I taught to love the
things that Lincoln loved by my mother.

Harry V. Jaffa

October 7, 1958

The Ohio State University

Columbus, Ohio

Contents

Acknowledgments 7

Preface 9

PART I. INTRODUCTORY

I. 1958: The Crisis in Historical Judgment 19

II. 1858: Lincoln versus Douglas. The Alternatives 28

PART II. THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

III. Slavery 41

IV. Manifest Destiny 63
V. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise I. The

Legal Power and Practical Impotence of Federal
Prohibitions of Slavery in the Territories 104

VI. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise II. Did
the Compromise of 1850 "Supersede" the Mis-
souri Compromise? 133
VII. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise III.

What Douglas Intended on January 4, 1854 147

VIII. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise IV.

Tragedy. The Extremes Crush the Mean 171

PART III. THE POLITICAL
PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

IX. The Teaching Concerning Political Salvation 183

X. The Teaching Concerning Political Moderation 236

PART IV. THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

XI. Hie Legal Tendency toward Slavery Expansion 275
XII. The Political Tendency toward Slavery Expansion 294

14 CONTENTS

XIII. The Intrinsic Evil of the Repeal of the Missouri
Compromise

XIV. The Universal Meaning of the Declaration of
Independence 308

XV. The Form and Substance of Political Freedom

in the Modern World 330
XVI. Popular Sovereignty: True and False 347
XVII. The Meaning of Equality: Abstract and Practical 363
XVIII. The "Natural Limits" of Slavery Expansion 387
XIX. Did the Republicans Abandon Lincoln's Prin-
ciples after the Election of 1860? 400
XX. The End of Manifest Destiny 405

Notes 410

APPENDICES

Appendix I. Some of the Historical Background to the

Lincoln-Douglas Debates 430

Appendix II. Some Notes on the Dred Scott Decision 441

Index 447

O, it is excellent

To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous

To use it like a giant.

Measure for Measure, Act II, Sc. ii.

But in these cases

We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.

Macbeth, Act I, Sc. vii.

Parti

INTRODUCTORY

Chapter I
1958: The Crisis in Historical Judgment

A CENTURY has not diminished the fame of the Lincoln-Douglas
debates. They are justly regarded as the greatest in American his-
tory, although in a deeper sense they constitute as well a unique
episode in the history of free government in the Western world.
It is doubtful that any forensic duel, any clash of reasoned argu-
ment before a popular audienceor, for that matter, before any
legislative body ever held the power of decision over the future
of a great people as these debates did. Whatever their intrinsic
merits, the magnitude of their consequences, for good or evil, is
as undeniable as it is incalculable. By opposing Douglas for the
senatorship in the Illinois campaign of 1858, Lincoln prevented
the Little Giant from capturing the leadership of the free-soil
movement, possibly even of the Republican party itself, at a mo-
ment when Douglas was being looked upon with the greatest
favor by eastern leaders of the party. At the same time that he
forced Douglas into a warfare with the Republicans that opened
an impassable breach between them and thereby kept open the
place for leadership which he himself soon filled Lincoln
also compelled Douglas to take ground that brought about a new
and more disastrous split in the Democratic party, a split which
contributed mightily to the election of a Republican, and minority
President, in 1860. Thus did Lincoln forge a great link in the chain
of events that led to secession and civil war.

Popular tradition has surrounded the debates with the aura
which, in retrospect at least, always attends a clash of champions.
It has ascribed to them a level of dialectic and rhetoric befitting
such a match. As to the intensity of the campaign and the

2O INTRODUCTORY

emotions it stirred in the principals and followers on both sides,
there can be no question. But the real worth of the debates cannot
be judged merely by popular tradition, particularly when it is re-
membered that that tradition is today largely the tradition of the
descendants of Lincoln's camp, for the debates proved the spring-
board whose momentum carried Lincoln to the White House and
to the chief responsibility for the nation's safety in its greatest
crisis. This tradition, finding a dramatic foil for its hero in Douglas,
has pictured Douglas as a brilliant but unscrupulous "dough-face,"
a "northern man with southern principles," whose high-flying
career was finally brought to earth by Lincoln's supreme political
logic. According to this view, what Socrates was to the Sophists,
what Sherlock Holmes was to Dr. Moriarty, what St. George was
to the dragon, so Lincoln was to Douglas. The analogy with
Socrates is perhaps the most apt, when it is remembered that
Lincoln is thought to have wrought Douglas's downfall with a cer-
tain famous question.

But this view of the debates is not regarded highly today by
leading authorities of the historical profession. "Solely on their
merits," writes Albert J. Beveridge in a classic biography pub-
lished in 1928, "the debates themselves deserve little notice." This
judgment is repeated nearly twenty years later by James G.
Randall, widely regarded today as the foremost academic author-
ity on Lincoln, who also quotes with approval the opinion of
George Fort Milton, the leading biographer and advocate of the
cause of Douglas. "Judged as debates, they do not measure up
to their reputation. On neither side did the dialectic compare with
that in the debates between Webster, Hayne, and Calhoun." 1

If this were a mere dash of critical cold water upon a piece
of folklore, it would perhaps not much matter. The literary
insignificance of campaign speeches is notorious, and the debates
were, after all, campaign speeches. X^t this agreement of more
recent opinion contrasts remarkably, not only with the folklore,
but with the mature and scholarly judgment of the more distant
past James Ford Rhodes, writing in the early iSgo's, said that
Lincoln, in the campaign of 1858 as well as in his speeches on
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and on the Dred Scott
decision, had formulated "a body of Republican doctrine which in
consistency, cogency, and fitness can nowhere be equalled." And
Rhodes, who was the supreme admirer of the great apostle of
the Union, could write that "such clearness of statement and ir-

1958: THE CRISIS IN HISTORICAL JUDGMENT 21

refragable proofs had not been known since the death of Webster."
As for rhetoric, Lincoln's "bursts of eloquence, under the influence
of noble passion, are still read with delight by the lovers of
humanity and constitutional government" "Listening to the argu-
ments of Lincoln and Douglas," said Rhodes, "the meanest voter
of Illinois must have felt that he was one of the jury in a cause
of transcendent importance, and that . . . the ablest advocates
of the country were appealing to him . . /* 2 Lord Charnwood,
writing his famous memoir a generation after Rhodes, goes even
further, in his opinion that Lincoln, in the debates, had "per-
formed what, apart from results, was a work of intellectual merit
beyond the compass of any American statesman since Hamilton." 3
The alteration of historical judgments is a phenomenon all too
familiar to every student. It is no accident that the school of which
Randall was the leading member and exponent calls itself, self-
consciously, revisionist. The work of "revision" is characterized by
him in the preface to his masterpiece, the multi-volumed Lincoln
the President, as follows: "If sources are diligently re-examined,
then by the same token the product may become 'revisionist/
Even in a simple matter it is not easy after the passage of years
to recover the true picture. If the past situation was complicated,
if many factors went into its making, if observers at the time
lacked full understanding or differed as to what it meant, and
especially if it has become controversial, then an uncommon effort
is needed to disengage reality from the accumulated deposit
which the years have brought . . .Evidence is. . .unearthed. . .
Discoloring is corrected, partisan misrepresentation ... is ex-
posed . . . Historical insight cuts through with a new clarity . . .
This is called 'revision/ but that suggests mere change or rewrit-
ing; a much better word for it would be historical restoration."
Randall then likens the work of the true historian to that of an
archaeologist: "Where a building belonging to a past age has
disappeared or fallen into ruin, there is the process of studying
available traces and records, examining the period, and gradually
building up a 'restoration' to show the structure as it originally
stood. With a like motive the historian seeks out original records,
excavates, so to speak, clears away unhistorical debris, and
endeavors, if he can, to restore events and essential situations of
the past/' Randall does not, therefore, like some contemporary his-
torians, 4 think it sufficient to replace the prejudices of one
generation with those of another in the rewriting of history. While

22 INTRODUCTORY

the revisionist does not expect to achieve perfection in his work,
"he does hope by fresh inquiry to come nearer to past reality."
"New conclusions come not from preconception, assuredly not
from a wish to overthrow or destroy. The historian searches; he
presents his findings; if he works validly he destroys nothing ex-
cept misconception and unfounded tradition." It is in this spirit,
we are told, that "the Lincoln-Douglas debates [have been]
reanalyzed."

The impression is, I think, inescapable that the severe judgment
upon the merits of these debates, coming after generations had
looked upon them as an intellectual and moral contest of the
highest order of which democratic politics admits, is a conse-
quence of the rise and application of scientific historical method.
This impression is greatly strengthened when it is discovered that
revisionism differs from both the popular and scholarly tradition
concerning the debates, not merely in the judgment of quality to
which we have adverted, but on a substantive question of the
first magnitude. For the depreciation of the debates is accom-
panied by indeed, it may be the consequence of a debunking
of the belief which is at the root of their fame: the belief that
Lincoln had opposed Douglas on a great issue and for the sake
of a great cause. Randall, in his "reanalysis," 5 concludes that
Lincoln and Douglas only "seemed to diffef" (Randall's italics)
while actually they were in substantial agreement on all important
questions. "For the debate to have had significance," he writes
with marked emphasis, "the contestants would . . . have been ex-
pected to enter upon the practical and substantial results of their
contrary positions." When, however, early in the canvass, "each
candidate sought to impale his opponent upon the spikes of for-
mal interrogation," it turned out that only upon the question of the
prohibition of slavery in the national territories was there a
difference. "Yet even on that point the difference was not vital
in its practical effect upon the results. That is to say, in the
territories that existed or might later be organized, Lincoln's de-
mand of Congressional prohibition for slavery would produce
freedom, but so would Douglas's principle of popular sovereignty
honestly applied." The "only point of difference," then, itself turns
out, according to Randall, to be "a talking point rather than a
matter for governmental action, a campaign appeal rather than
a guide for legislation."

It must be apparent that the judgment now confronting us is

1958: THE CRISIS IN HISTORICAL JUDGMENT 23

as shocking and paradoxical as any rendered upon our national
history. How paradoxical this example of revisionism is, how
greatly it contradicts the common or common-sense-conception
of this historic episode, may be further gathered from the follow-
ing contemporary estimate of the Illinois campaign of 1858 by a
man who had labored in Douglas's camp: "It was no ordinary
contest, in which political opponents skirmished for the amuse-
ment of an indifferent audience, but it was a great uprising of
the people, in which the masses were politically, and to a
considerable extent socially, divided and arrayed against each
other. In fact, it was a fierce and angry struggle, approximating
the character of a revolution." 6 That it is also shocking is evident
the moment one remembers the immense importance of these de-
bates in furthering the breakup of national parties and drawing
the nation toward the abyss of civil war. For if the issue between
Lincoln and Douglas was a mere talking point, if Douglas had
as good a solution to the problem of slavery in the territories as
Lincoln had, then what justification did Lincoln have to oppose
Douglas and to bring on such an angry and deep-seated struggle?
The inference is well-nigh inescapable that Lincoln opposed
Douglas only to further his own ambitions, that he deliberately
accepted the chance of civil war (which Douglas repeatedly ac-
cused him of inviting) by his house divided doctrine and by his
"prediction" that the nation was faced with the awful choice of
becoming all slave or all free. If Lincoln forced an illusory alter-
native upon the country, he must be accused of bringing on the
very crisis he predicted, with the end in view not the future free-
dom of the nation's soil (which Randall insists that Douglas had
already guaranteed) but the political future of A. Lincoln. We
may even better appreciate the devastating character of the moral
judgment herein implied if we ask: What would have happened
had Lincoln accepted Greeley's advice and the Illinois Republi-
cans had supported, or at least not opposed, Douglas's return to
the Senate? The answers to such "iffy" questions are at best
problematical, but we may venture the following with as much
confidence as Randall advances the hypothesis that popular sov-
ereignty would of itself have kept slavery out of the territories. 7
Douglas, who had so recently led the Republicans in Congress
to victory over the Buchanan forces upon the issue of a fraudulent
slave constitution for Kansas, would not have moved away from
them had Lincoln not forced him to do so. Thus his position

24 INTRODUCTORY

vis-&-vis the Danites, or administration Democrats, would have
been stronger throughout the North. This strength he might then
have used, either to dictate terms of reconciliation within his own
party, or to move over to the Republicans completely. Or, if
Douglas had headed a new free-soil party (it might have been
called Democratic-Republican, reviving the original simon-pure
Jeffersonian nomenclature), including Douglas Democrats as well
as all the principal ingredients of the combination that supported
Lincoln in 1860 (exclusive of lunatic-fringe abolitionists and
Know-Nothings), he might have led a party with a far broader
base than Lincoln achieved in the next presidential campaign.
It should be remembered that, although Lincoln would have been
elected in 1860 even if all the votes actually cast for other candi-
dates had been combined in favor of any one of them, he received
only a fraction under 40 per cent of the popular vote in that
year. At the same time Douglas received nearly 30 per cent of
the popular vote in the country. Of the combined Lincoln-
Douglas vote in the free states, Lincoln received 60 per cent
and Douglas 40 per cent, and this tells why Lincoln's victory
was so decisive in the electoral college. Yet, although the split
in the Democratic vote did not directly cause Lincoln's election,
indirectly it must have played a tremendous, if immeasurable,
role. For the split made the election of Douglas (whose strength
in 1860 was far more diffused throughout the country than that of
any other candidate) by the electoral college a virtual impos-
sibility. This fact, moreover, was well known throughout the
campaign. Had Americans chosen their President by direct popu-
lar vote in 1860, it is far from improbable that, notwithstanding
the damaging campaign of 1858, Douglas might have polled many
more votes than Lincoln.

Because of the peculiarities of the electoral system, the only
real alternative to Lincoln's election by the electoral college was
an election in the House or, still more probably, in the Senate.
Had Douglas carried New York or Pennsylvania, for example, in
both of which there were fusion tickets in the field against Lincoln
in 1860, then the electoral college might very likely have failed
to produce a majority. The South might have prevented the elec-
tion of any candidate in the House, where voting would have
gone by states, and under the Twelfth Amendment the President
inaugurated in 1861 might have been the man chosen by the
Senate to be Vice-president The cry of "Lincoln or Lane" un-

1958: THE CRISIS IN HISTORICAL JUDGMENT 2$

doubtedly sent many Douglas men into Lincoln's camp in 1860.
This suggests the extreme probability that a coalition of Douglas
Democrats and Greeley-Seward Republicans in 1860 might have
produced a far greater electoral triumph for the free-soil move-
ment in that year, even if the candidate had been Seward and
not Douglas.

Had the free-soil candidate of 1860 enjoyed the vastly greater
popular plurality that an addition of the Lincoln and Douglas
vote suggests, it would have taken far greater moral courage for
the South to have seceded. That a large minority had voted
against Lincoln in the free states helped to convince opinion in
the South that the North would never coerce them to remain
in the Union. The South had long been warned by Calhoun that
it ought not remain in a union in which the constitutional minority
should be defenseless against the power of a constitutional major-
ity. In the eyes of many, however, that the power of the constitu-
tional majority should be exercised by an actual minority was
not merely intolerable but contemptible.

In contemplating a possible alliance of Douglas with the
Republicans we must keep in mind that, prior to the Illinois
campaign of 1858, this party was by no means fixed in the mold
which, however tenuously, Lincoln cast upon it as a result of that
campaign. The radicalism of the house divided speech, so much
deplored by Randall, was so little ingrained in the rank and file
that even in the nominating convention of 1860 an amendment
to affirm the principles of the Declaration of Independence as part
of the party platform was voted down. A threatened revolt caused
it to be included later, but without general enthusiasm and "with-
out any application in terms of racial equality." 8 Any analysis of
Lincoln's campaigns (in 1858 or 1860) makes it clear that, by
opposing Douglas and thereby losing to the Republicans the
free-soil Democrats whom Douglas could have carried into a
Republican ( or coalition ) camp, Lincoln was forced to appeal to
abolitionist elements which his party might otherwise have dis-
pensed with. Having staked out a position in the house divided
speech to which abolitionists could rally, Lincoln characteristically
drew back from it in order to keep as much as possible of the
anti-abolitionist free-soil opinion marshaled behind him. It was,
however, the careful specification of Republican orthodoxy in the
house divided speech, breaking up the anti-Lecompton coalition
of the winter and spring of 1857-58, which read Douglas and his

26 INTRODUCTORY

dyed-in-the-wool followers out of the free-soil party 9 and thus
made it imperative that the Republicans recruit their ranks from
abolitionists, however much these remained a minority in the
party as a whole. Further, once Lincoln staked out a radical
claim, whether he meant to be radical himself or not, it was
inevitable that Douglas would pursue the obvious strategy of
identifying Lincoln and his party with its most radical element.
This was no more than Lincoln himself was doing when he insisted
throughout the campaign that Douglas's position of alleged in-
difference to slavery was the most effective and dangerous pro-
slavery policy possible.

Lincoln was responsible then not only for a definite shift in
Republican oratory toward the inclusion of abolitionist slogans
(Lincoln's house divided speech was in June 1858; Seward's
"irrepressible conflict" came the following October; and Seward
was one of those reported to have considered a coalition with
Douglas!) but for assuring that his party would be advertised
and identified throughout the country, above all in the South, as
the abolition party. Thus, by furthering the split in the Demo-
cratic party, as we have suggested, Lincoln did more than merely
promote the election of a minority Republican president in 1860.
By creating the chasm between Douglas Democrats and Republi-
cans he caused to be fastened upon the Republicans a character
that would, to the existing mind and temper of the South, be
indistinguishable from abolitionism, thus increasing beyond meas-
ure the likelihood of secession when such a party should carry a
national election. If a Democrat had been elected in 1860, whether
Douglas or another, it is improbable in the extreme that secession
would have followed. But if Douglas had effected a coalition
with the Republicans, and if the combination which carried the
fight against Buchanan Democracy over the Lecompton fraud in
Kansas and kept the soil there free under the banner of popular
sovereignty had carried the presidency in 1860, it is equally
difficult to imagine secession. For such a coalition would have
possessed other advantages than the moral authority of a far
greater weight at the polls, as suggested above. If the campaign
of 1858 in Illinois had seen a united Douglas Democracy-Republi-
can free-soil movement beating down the miserable fraud of
Lecompton-Buchanan Democracy, there would have been no
necessity to flaunt before the South either the Freeport Doctrine
of Douglas or the abolitionism of the Republicans. It was by

1958: THE CRISIS IN HISTORICAL JUDGMENT 27

making both Douglas Democracy and Republicanism bitterly
unacceptable to the South that Lincoln, above all others, made
the Civil War the "irrepressible conflict" it became.

It is the great revisionist thesis that the Civil War was a "need-
less war," that it was a "whipped-up crisis," not the result of
"fundamental motives," but of "war-making agitation." 10 If Lin-
coln was not a fanatic or agitator in the sense in which Randall
uses those terms, it is indubitable that he, more than any man,
helped produce the situation in which fanaticism and agitation
could do their deadly work. To say that Lincoln did so, not for a
substantial good that might not otherwise have been attained, but
only to keep alive a "talking point," a point that might and did
"talk" the country into fratricidal war, is to give him a character
that, in the profundity of its immorality, is beyond treason. A
Benedict Arnold sells out for gold, but while he may destroy
his country he degrades only himself. But a man who makes
enemies and aliens of friends and fellow citizens corrupts the
soul of the body politic. To create strife where there was none,
or where there need have been none, as a means to one's own
fame, is to make honor the reward not of virtue or public benefit
but of baseness and mischief-making. If the order of talents of
the man who does this is high, so much the more reprehensible
is his action.

If this conclusion concerning Lincoln appears unbearably harsh,
we must protest that we have done no more than draw inferences
from premises firmly fixed in the pages of revisionist historiog-
raphy. We can see no way of questioning the conclusion but by
questioning the premises. Was there no substantial difference be-
tween Lincoln's policy and Douglas's at the time of the debates?
Would Douglas's policy have produced freedom as surely as
Lincoln's, without the additional hazard of letting slip the dogs of
fanaticism and the dogs of war? In short, how successfully does
Randall's "valid" historiography contradict the illusion of a cen-
tury, that the clash of Lincoln and Douglas was a great contest
for the highest stakes and that these stakes were not the personal
stakes of the principals but the future of free government not
only for the people of the United States but, by reason of their
example, for the world?

Chapter II

1858: Lincoln versus Douglas.
The Alternatives

IN A most remarkable obiter dictum, Randall observes that "one
of the most colossal misconceptions is the theory that funda-
mental motives produce war. The glaring and obvious fact is the
artificiality of war-making agitation." 1 Unfortunately Randall never
explains to us the ground for his distinction between fundamental
and non-fundamental (or "artificial") motives. He regards it as
"obvious." But every historian knows that what is obvious to one
generation may not be at all obvious to the next; that the self-
evident truths of Jefferson may become self-evident lies to Cal-
houn. In like manner, Randall contemplates the two practical
questions upon which the North-South controversy focused in the
immediate pre-Civil War period: "What should be done about
an almost non-existent slave population in the West, or about a
small trickle of runaway bondsmen, was magnified into an issue
altogether out of scale with its importance." 2 But again, we ask,
important to whom? We agree that judgment upon such issues
as those that divided Lincoln and Douglas and the North and
the South is of the essence of the historian's function. But if we
consider revisionism's primary aim, of historical "restoration" an
aim we accept unreservedly the attempt first to see the past as
it appeared in the past and not only in the light of the opinions
of a later and different age, it is strange that Randall should so
beg the question of why Lincoln, Douglas, and their contemporar-
ies treated as real, fundamental, and important the differences
he refers to as illusory, artificial, and slight For the most super-
ficial reading of the debates shows that the debaters themselves

1858: LINCOLN VERSUS DOUGLAS 2%

regarded their differences as radical and profound. Randall him-
self confesses wonderingly that "the intensity of the discussion
baffled description." 3

Among the Lilliputians, the greatest of all human differences
was conceived to be the difference between those who opened
their eggs at the big end and those who opened their eggs at
the little end. Randall would no doubt feel confirmed in his opin-
ion of war by the conflict between Lilliput and Blefuscu. Yet,
however justified he might be, even in this case one would, we
should think, want to hear how the issues might be stated by, or
in behalf of, a Big-Endian and a Little-Endian. Many a throat
has been cut for theological differences no more readily intelligi-
ble to the bystander than those satirized by Swift in the voyage
to Lilliput. But who will boldly say that theological differences
may not be fundamental?

Randall, in his zeal to do what he thinks is justice to Douglas,
has written that "any attempt to add luster to Lincoln's fame
by belittling Douglas or by exaggerating the differences between
the two men would be a perversion of history/' 4 Now, to exag-
gerate, except perhaps as a rhetorical device, is always a perver-
sion of history because, by definition, exaggeration is a form of
misrepresentation. And there can be no merit, of course, in
contributing to the undeserved reputation of any man. Whatever
fame may justly belong to Lincoln is cheapened by its admixture
with undeserved fame, and the attempt decried by Randall would
be foolish as well as dishonest. If exaggerating differences is
wrong, so is it wrong to minimize them. And if we are to regard
reputations, it may be remarked that Douglas's no less than
Lincoln's suffers by trivializing the issues between them, for
Douglas did not regard the difference between himself and
Lincoln, which Randall treats as a mere matter of method in
keeping slavery out of the territories, as a small one. For Douglas,
as for Lincoln, it was immensely important that the form of the
government of the territories accord with what he believed to be
the true spirit of free political institutions. The principle of popu-
lar sovereignty, as he interpreted it, was to Douglas the key to
political freedom, both in the United States and in the world.
The American Revolution, he observed (echoing Webster), had
been fought over a preamble the preamble to the Stamp Act
asserting the right of Parliament to bind the colonies in all cases
whatsoever. The tax on tea was itself of no consequence, but the

30 INTRODUCTORY

concession of principle involved in paying it was of transcendent
importance. According to Douglas, it was the violation of the
right of self-government which was the cause of the revolt of
the thirteen colonies. Lincoln's principle, he maintained, that
Congress might intervene to prevent the spread of slavery, meant
that it might legislate the domestic institutions of territories and
thereby determine the character of future states. The power so
to do, Douglas maintained, rightfully belonged only to the in-
habitants of those communities, and for anyone else to exercise
this power would be of a piece with the attempt of the British
King and Parliament to do for the colonists those things, whether
good or bad, which the colonists believed might rightfully be
done only by their own legislatures.

The principle of popular sovereignty meant the principle
whereby each distinct political community, whether state or
territory, determined for itself the institutions by which its daily
life was lived, subject only to those general rules, embodied in
the Constitution, which guaranteed to each its equal right to pur-
sue its own way. Douglas, no less than Lincoln, saw in the
American experiment the trial of the cause of political freedom
for all humanity. The unity in diversity which the democratic
federal Republic embodied was for him, no less than for his
opponent, the world's best hope. Yet Lincoln and Douglas under-
stood the nature of that unity, and the nature of that diversity,
in radically different terms. On the fact of their antagonism and
on its importance they were in agreement with each other and
in disagreement with Professor Randall.

Lincoln held that free government was, in principle, incom-
patible with chattel slavery^ The sheet anchor of American
republicanism, he held, was that no man was good enough to
govern another without that other's consent. There was no princi-
ple, Lincoln often argued, that might justify the enslavement of
Negroes that might not also, with equal force, be used to enslave
white men. Every concession made to Negro slavery weakened
by so much the attachment of white men to the charter of their
own freedom, and by so much prepared them to be subjects of
the first cunning tyrant who should arise among them. Lincoln
frequently compared slavery to cancer. It is not possible always
to excise the malignancy without causing the patient to bleed
to death, but neither is it possible for it to spread without causing

1858: LINCOLN VERSUS DOUGLAS 3!

death. The primary aim in both cases is to arrest the growth or
spread of the element which is alien and hostile to the life
principle, whether of the natural body or of the body politic.

Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty, with its self-pro-
claimed neutrality toward whether slavery was voted up or voted
down, was a sheer absurdity on its face, according to Lincoln.
How could anyone, he asked, at one and the same time advocate
self-government and be indifferent to the denial of self-govern-
ment? Anyone sincerely desirous of self-governmentwhich popu-
lar sovereignty allegedly meant could not, Lincoln held, be
indifferent to slavery. The relation of master and slave was a total
violation of self-government; to justify despotism was of necessity
to condemn self-government, and to justify self-government was
of necessity to condemn despotism. A popular sovereignty which
could, even in theory, issue in the despotic rule of one man by
another was a living lie, said Lincoln, and to embalm such a lie
in the heart of a great act of national legislation an act which
announced to the world the principle by which the American
republic incorporated vast acquisitions into its empire would
be a calamity for human freedom. For whatever the immediate
practical effects of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, either in introducing
or excluding slavery from the remaining Louisiana territory, its
ultimate effects would have been no less disastrous to Lincoln
than a change in the First Commandment from the singular deity
to a plural would have been to a pious Jew or Christian.

As Lincoln held that no man was good enough to govern an-
other without that others consent, so Douglas held that no
community of free men or group of such communities was good
enough to dictate the domestic institutions of another community
of free men. Lincoln, while holding that slavery in the abstract
was unjust, conceded that it might be a necessary evil in some
circumstances. But who should determine when such a necessity
existed? Those who went out to populate the plains of Kansas,
like those who had gone earlier to California, were not to be
supposed inferior in wisdom or virtue to their less adventurous
and hardy kinsmen whom they had left behind in the older states.
Yet these pioneers, like their colonial forebears vis-a-vis the Par-
liament at Westminster, were not represented in Congress. If
Congress could not legislate on slavery in the states, which were
represented in Congress, why should it legislate on slavery in

32 INTRODUCTORY

the territories, which were not represented in it? As for any man
not being good enough to govern another, Douglas maintained:

The civilized world have always held, that when any race of
men have shown themselves so degraded, by ignorance, su-
perstitution, cruelty, and barbarism, as to be utterly incapable
of governing themselves, they must, in the nature of things,
be governed by others, by such laws as are deemed applica-
ble to their condition.

That Douglas was not simply hearkening back to the antiquated
distinction between "Greeks and barbarians" is shown by the
language of that advanced liberal, John Stuart Mill, in his essay
On Liberty, published first in the year 1859:

Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing
with barbarians . . . Liberty, as a principle, has no applica-
tion to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind
have become capable of being improved by free and equal
discussions.

That the Negroes of America, by and large, were not "capable
of being improved by free and equal discussion" was common
ground to all but an infinitesimal minority in 1858. Lincoln, as
we shall see, repeatedly declared himself against doing anything
to "bring about the political and social equality of the white and
black races." Douglas just as often hurled the allegation of utter
inconsistency, of political trimming, against Lincoln on this score.
If the Negroes were admittedly not to be our equals, then they
must be our inferiors and governed by us, Douglas argued.
Humanity and Christianity enjoin that the Negro be accorded
every right, privilege, and immunity consistent with the safety
and welfare of society. The practical question is: What are those
rights? This question, Douglas averred, must be answered by each
state and territory for itself.

Illinois had decided that the Negro should be neither a slave
nor a citizen; other states had decreed slavery; still others had
decided that Negroes might vote. Of the latter, some decreed
special qualifications for Negro voters in addition to those re-
quired of white men, while others did not draw any such invidi-
ous distinction. Douglas's central practical contention came to
this: that as Negro rights had, by the nature of the case, to be
decided by white men, the white men competent to degide

1858: LINCOLN VERSUS DOUGLAS 33

wgce. those closest to the Negroes whose rights were to be decided.
Conditions in Maine differed widely from those in Mississippi.
Would anyone contend that the laws proper for the few free
Negroes of New England were proper for the masses of still
primitive Africans of the Deep South? Or vice versa? If Congress
might leave it to the territorial legislatures to determine the laws
governing the relation of husband and wife, parent and child,
to establish entire civil and criminal codes, why might it not
also leave it to them to decide concerning master and servant?
For Douglas, the essence of free government lay in the power
of decision by free men on issues of vital importance to them-
selves. To deprive communities of free men of their power of
decision over grave questions simply because they were grave was
to strike at the main ground of justification of both federalism
and democracy. He once said that the principle of the Kansas-
Nebraska Act originated when God made man and placed good
and evil before him, allowing him to choose for himself. As man's
humanity lay in his power so to choose, so also did political
freedom, Whether the external force was an absolute monarch, a
parliament, or the Congress of the United States did not alter
the case. The argument for self-government rested upon the
competence of the people to decide all questions, including those
of right and wrong, or there was no valid argument for self-
government. Like Lord Randolph Churchill, Douglas's motto was
"Trust the people. M tIncoln and the Black Republican party
treated the Declaration of Independence as if it insisted upon a
universal leveling of the conditions of men everywhere, instead of.
raising the heads of free men above the common level, in virtue
of their uncommon virtue and sacrifices. Their interpretation was
a slander upon the Fathers, who would have been hypocrites
had they meant to declare slavery against natural and divine
law and then continued one and all to represent slaveholding
constituencies and, most of them, to hold slaves themselves.
Douglas's interpretation of the famous proposition was, in sub-
stance, that it meant "equality for equals only," and he believed
that Lincoln's interpretation, by giving equality to unequals, was
subversive of aU order and justice. If Negroes might not justly be
enslaved where their inferior natures or the interests of society
required, they might not justly be denied any other equal right
The Black Republican credo, if adopted, would set in motion
forces which could not stop short of full political and social

34 INTRODUCTORY

equality, of miscegenation and mongrelization, such as had come
to pass in Central and South America, where the natives had
shown themselves utterly incapable of the self-government that
flourished in the former British colonies.

To all this Lincoln replied that Douglas had drawn a false issue.
Lincoln conceded that there was a physical difference between
the white and black races which would probably forever forbid
their living together upon a plane of equality. It was the ancient
faith of the Fathers that all men are created equal. Yet that
faith did not categorically forbid the denial of any land of equality
to Negroes any more than it immediately placed all white men
upon a plane of complete equality. But Negroes were equal to
white men in certain inalienable rights, and in virtue of those
inalienable rights it was wrong to deny any man the right to put
into his mouth the bread that his own hand had earned. Douglas's
bogey-the slaveocrats' bogey-that the alternative to slavery was
full political and social equality, Lincoln called a horse-chestnut
argument, "a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by
which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse."
Lincoln said it did not follow that if he did not want a Negro
woman as a slave he must want her as a wife; he could just
leave her alone. If it was true that less had been given to the
Negro, the Negro was not for that reason less entitled to keep
the portion that was his. Lincoln's ancient faith taught him, he
said, that the Negro was a man and entitled to justice, but slavery
was a total abrogation of justice. Although it might in some cir-
cumstances be a necessary evil, it was an evil all the same. To call
it otherwise would be to pervert all truth, to poison the wells
of public morality at their source in that public opinion which
is the foundation of all political action in a free society.

But, Lincoln insisted, he did not advocate abolition or any
interference with slavery where it already existed. He conceded
fully that part of Douglas's argument which placed the primary
responsibility for determining the master-servant relation with
those who Uved with it. Living in a free state, he would not
chide his southern brethren for their tardiness in adopting
schemes of gradual emancipation, much as he was in favor of
such action. But although as a citizen of Illinois he had neither
the responsibility nor the right to act with respect to slavery in
the slave states, this did not forbid him to express his opinion
and advocate legislation with respect to virgin territories, the

1858: LINCOLN VERSUS DOUGLAS 35

common possession of the Union, where no master-servant prob-
lem yet existed. There the question was not what laws were best
suited for dealing with the Negro but should slavery and its
concomitant evils be permitted to exist there at all? If the United
States had somehow suddenly found itself possessed of a land
with a large Negro population, such as Cuba, the question would
then have been: What laws are best for these Negroes? But the
vast virgin lands of Nebraska, like the lands acquired from
Mexico, to which Lincoln had voted "forty times" to apply the
Wilmot Proviso, had virtually no Negroes in them. To keep them
out, and with them the train of problems their introduction would
bring, was something no rational person devoted to civil liberty
could, according to Lincoln, fail to desire. If Douglas really feared
miscegenation, let him join the Republicans in restricting slavery,
for slavery was precisely the cause of at least nine tenths of all
miscegenation in this country. Free Negro girls were not likely
to become the mothers of mulattoes without their own consent,
at least.

When Douglas professed indifference as to whether slavery was
voted up or voted down, he meant that not humanity or Christi-
anity, or even the safety of society, but material self-interest was
to determine Negro rights. John Stuart Mill, while admitting that
despotism was a legitimate mode of government for barbarians,
added, "provided the end be their improvement, and the means
justified by actually effecting that end." Said Douglas, however:

... we ought to extend to the negro race, and to all other
dependent races, all the rights, all the privileges, and all
the immunities which they can exercise consistently with the
safety of society. Humanity requires that we should give them
all these privileges; Christianity commands that we should
extend those privileges to them. The question then arises,
What are those privileges, and what is the nature and extent
of them? My answer is that that is a question which each
State must answer for itself. We in Illinois have decided
it for ourselves. We tried slavery, kept it up for twelve years,
and finding it was not profitable, we abolished it for that
reason, and became a Free State.

Or, on another occasion:

Whenever a territory has a climate, soil, and productions
making it the interest of the inhabitants to encourage slave

36 INTRODUCTORY

property, they will pass a slave code and give it encourage-
ment. Whenever the climate, soil, and productions preclude
the possibility of slavery being profitable, they will not permit
it. You come right back to the principle of dollar and cents.

Such statements, according to Lincoln, showed that Douglas
"has no very vivid impression that the negro is a human; and
consequently has no idea that there can be any moral question
in legislating about him! In his view, the question of whether
a new country shall be slave or free, is a matter of as utter
indifference, as it is whether his neighbor shall plant his farm
with tobacco, or stock it with horned cattle." Popular sovereignty,
so called, was thus wrong, "wrong in its direct effect, letting
slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, and wrong in its prospective
principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide
world, where men can be found inclined to take it." This policy,
Lincoln said, first in 1854 an d ever a ft er -

I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice
of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican
example of its just influence in the worldenables the ene-
mies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as
hypocrites causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our
sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good
men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very
fundamental principles of civil liberty criticizing the Dec-
laration of Independence, and insisting there is no right
principle of action but self-interest.

But did not Lincoln see by the summer of 1858 what virtually
the whole country saw, that Kansas would never become a slave
state and that it was only a matter of time until it became a
free state under popular sovereignty? And that there was no place
in the remaining Louisiana territory so favorable to slavery as
Kansas? Was his doctrinal moral opposition to Douglas worth
continuing? Had not Washington himself said that slavery could
in fact be abolished only by making it unprofitable? Had not
Washington sought to link the valleys of the Potomac and the
Ohio with roads and canals so that the spread of commerce and
industry into Virginia and the upper South would render the
slave labor system unprofitable? 5 And was not Douglas as much
a practical idealist as Washington by trying to open the West

1858: LINCOLN VERSUS DOUGLAS 37

as rapidly as possible and thereby develop a continental railroad
system? Was not Douglas's policy far more effective in its anti-
slavery bearing than any merely doctrinal moral crusade?

It seems incontestable that, while both men could not have
been equally right in the positions they took in 1858, neither held
his position out of mere expediency, although we may be sure
that each was convinced of the expediency of the position he
took. Both men approached the climax of political careers extend-
ing over a quarter of a century. Though Douglas's contemporary
success and fame greatly exceeded Lincoln's, the latter's political
apprenticeship had been thorough; and his 1838 speech "On the
Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions" showed a conscious
dedication of his life to preparation for just such a moment as
this. Nor did the policy of either man reflect light or transient
causes; rather it was the result of applying principles of whose
validity each was deeply convinced and which alone seemed to
illuminate the path of the American people as they struggled
to find their way through the darkest enigma ever to perplex
a democratic nation.

Although Douglas was the far better known man in 1858 in-
deed, it is doubtful that any party chieftain and statesman who
has not occupied the presidential chair has enjoyed such fame
and power in his own lifetime, unless it be Henry Clay or Robert
A. Taft his career prior to the debates is today relatively un-
known. We shall try to restore the proportions of 1858 by first
presenting an account of the highlights of Douglas's political life
and thought, from his entry upon the national scene in 1843 until
his great duel with Lincoln. In this account we shall be as
sympathetic as possible, seeking the highest ground from which
to survey Douglas's embattled career. For we wish, in such an
account, to see the best justification of Douglas's course in 1858
that a devoted follower or, rather, that Douglas himself may have
seen as he surveyed his record and came to grips with his supreme
antagonist.

Part II

THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

Chapter III
Slavery

THE charge most damaging to Douglas's reputation through the
years, given the widest currency among historians by James Ford
Rhodes, was that he thought moral considerations had no place
in politics. In recent years this has been repeated and elaborated
by Allan Nevins. 1 Yet it is hardly an exaggeration to say that
Douglas has suffered more from his defenders than from his de-
tractors. George Fort Milton, his most violent contemporary
partisan, calls him a "realist in an emotional age" who "sought
to buttress his policies of economic intelligence" with "dialectics"
because "he lived in an age when speech in any other vocabulary
would not have been comprehended." This suggests that Douglas
was a kind of commissar dealing with a backward proletariat.
Yet there is no evidence that Douglas himself would have com-
prehended his own policies in any other idiom than the one he
used, or that such a distinction as that between "economic
intelligence" and "dialectics" existed in his mind. In his devotion
to what he understood to be the mission of free republican
institutions Douglas was as emotional as any man who lived in
his age.

Douglas entered politics as a follower of Andrew Jackson. The
image of Old Hickory was the star to which he hitched his wagon
and to which he ever remained loyal. Like his hero, he loved and
hated well. He loved the Union and was a fierce and belligerent
nationalist He joined hands with Jackson's old enemy, Henry
Clay, to drive through the compromise measures of 1850 (even
as Clay had assisted Jackson in the nullification crisis of 1832),
because he believed the compromise would preserve and

^2, THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

strengthen the Union. But, as he said in 1860, when he went
into the heart of the secessionist country, convinced that the
election of Lincoln was impending, he would hang higher than
Haman (echoing Jackson's words a quarter century before) any
man who resisted by force the execution of any provision of the
Constitution. In this, his finest hour, Douglas's patriotism burned
as intensely as did that of Washington or Lincoln.

Douglas was, moreover, an enemy of prejudice ethnic, reli-
gious, or sectional. The heir of Jackson was devoted to enlarging
the basis of participation in American democracy. But how to
enlarge the basis of democracy in the 1850'$ was a difficult
question, involving to a considerable degree choosing between
the rights of Negroes and the rights of white immigrants. In
contrasting his record with Lincoln's concerning the Negro, we
must also contrast their records concerning the Know-Nothings,
the "Native Americans'* who sought to make second-class citizens
of the foreign-born, particularly those of non-Anglo-Saxon stock.
While Lincoln kept almost silent about them in public, expressing
his strong hostility only privately, Douglas attacked the Know-
Nothings openly, repeatedly, and vehemently. Moreover, it
should be realized that, in speaking ill of Negroes as he did,
Douglas only took one horn of a profound dilemma. That dilemma
was whether to condemn the moral code of white men in the
slave states who were his friends, relatives, and fellow citizens or,
by speaking tolerantly of the right of the South to its "peculiar
institution," to concede the only premise upon which such a right
seemed justified; namely, the inferiority of the black race. The
concession to pro-slavery opinion which Douglas made the
minimum concession needed to maintain the Democratic party
as a national party and to preserve popular government in a
nation increasingly rent by a deep moral cleavage may thus have
appeared to him as the choice of a lesser evil. That Douglas did,
in the last analysis, feel more in common with pro-slavery opinion
than with abolitionism (which Lincoln also opposed) does not
mean that he accepted it. Douglas, like Lincoln, had deep per-
sonal as well as party ties with the South. The intolerance of
the abolitionists seemed to him the more provocative as well as
the more aggressive of the two extremes, and his passionate
concern with the constitutional rights of the South led him to
pour scorn upon the racial egalitarianism of its detractors.

SLAVERY 40

Allan Nevins calls Douglas a man of "dim moral perceptions"
who failed to see that "the irresistible tidal forces of history are
moral forces." 2 According to Nevins, the forces of history, the
movements of world opinion in the nineteenth century were ir-
resistibly away from irresponsible autocracies and toward respon-
sible democracies; away from slavery, in its many world-wide
forms, toward personal freedom. Yet Nevins fails to explain how
a statesman standing at the juncture of conflicting currents can
infallibly know which way the tide of history is flowing. Lincoln
at Gettysburg called the Civil War a test and meant thereby
a genuine crisis whose event was doubtful. Lincoln certainly saw
no predetermined direction of history. Moreover, Nevins does not
tell us why swimming with the tide of historyassuming it has
one is morally superior to opposing it. May not a man choose
nobly to oppose the "tide" of events? Has not many a good cause
been saved by a stand, against all odds, by one who refused
to count the odds? In the somewhat overblown peroration of a
speech in 1839, Lincoln expressed this old-fashioned thought as
follows:

If I ever feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those
dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect,
it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted
by all the world beside, and I standing boldly and alone and
hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here without
contemplating consequences, before High Heaven, and in the
face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as
I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty, and my love . . .
Let none falter, who thinks he is right, and we may succeed.
But if, after all, we shall fail, be it so. We shall still have the
proud consolation of saying to our consciences, and to the
departed shade of our country's freedom, that the cause
approved of our judgment, and adored of our hearts, in disas-
ter, in torture, in death, we never faltered in defending. 3

When Douglas undertook to repeal the Missouri Compromise
in 1854, he is reported to have said that he knew it would raise a
"hell of a storm." But he had determined upon a course which
he believed to be right and in the long-run interests of all he
held dear. He too felt that a crisis had been reached and must be
passed, that the rising tide of abolitionism was threatening to
wrench American politics from its normal channels, within which

44 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

national majorities and minorities could peacefully divide, and
substitute a sectional issue upon which compromise would not be
possible. When that was accomplished, the Union he loved would
perish; and no more than Webster or Lincoln did he wish to see
that day. If Douglas's doctrine of popular sovereignty, of allowing
local majorities everywhere to decide the slavery question, had
been accepted by the main body of northern opinion as an accept-
able principle for dealing with the "vexed question," Douglas
would have proved the master of the irresistible tidal force he
roused against himself in 1854. And, in fact, only Lincoln's
opposition in 1858 hurled Douglas down as he stood near, very
near, the pinnacle of success.

Douglas was not blind to the moral implications of the slavery
question. If he was constrained to profess indifference as to
whether it was voted up or down, this was a logical implication
of his commitment to popular sovereignty, according to which
slavery ought to be dealt with at the local level. What his policy
of "Don't care" really meant was that he believed he ought not to
express an official opinion on a subject which he did not believe
ought to come within the scope of his official responsibility. Taking
the stand that the Constitution did not give Congress any rightful
power over slavery except the power, coupled with the duty,
to provide for the rendition of fugitives Douglas felt it was the
duty of every member of Congress, by a kind of self-denying
ordinance, to abstain from expressing views on the substantive
issues raised by slavery, issues belonging by right to the state
and territorial governments alone. As far as the federal govern-
ment was concerned, Douglas wished to treat slavery as a juris-
dictional question, and he knew that if he permitted himself to
express opinions on the merits of slavery he would defeat his own
purpose, which was to deny jurisdiction over it to the national
legislature. For Douglas was convinced that the Union would
not survive differences of opinion on slavery in that forum. To
repeat: Douglas did not wish to speak on the merits of the slavery
question because he did not wish Congress to become the forum
for policies he believed could properly and effectively be framed
only at the local level, state or territorial. In 1858, after the
Lecompton battle royal, but one public word from Douglas on
the immorality of slavery one word merely to the effect that
popular sovereignty, instead of "not caring" whether slavery was

SLAVERY 45

voted up or down, was in fact the best constitutional instrument
for giving effect to the overwhelming northern free-soil condem-
nation of slavery in the territoriesand Douglas could have
destroyed Lincoln's whole claim to leadership and made himself
the unquestioned free-soil leader in the Northwest. Lincoln well
knew this when, in his house divided speech, he said:

Now, as ever I wish not to misrepresent Judge Douglas's
position, question his motives, or do aught that can be per-
sonally offensive to him.

Whenever, if ever, he and we can come together on princi-
ple, so that our great cause may have assistance from his
great ability, I hope to have interposed no adventitious
obstacle.

Nevins, in his indictment of Douglas, says that Douglas's biog-
raphers "have found in all his speeches and letters only one or
two intimating a dislike of slavery. A hundred can be found which
show that, as he once said, he did not care whether it be voted
up or down." In fact, Douglas used the famous "Don't care" phrase
in one or another form a number of times, although not nearly as
often as its incessant repetition by Lincoln and other Republicans
would make one think. And while Nevins gives several examples
of Douglas's alleged moral obliquity in relation to slavery, he gives
none of the "one or two" anti-slavery expressions. In 1860 the
Illinois Republican State Central Committee compiled a pam-
phlet entitled The Political Record of Stephen A. Douglas on
the Slavery Question. In it there are four double-column pages,
of the smallest-size type, which give his supposed anti-slavery
record, and eleven giving his supposed pro-slavery record. Even
this campaign document by the Republicans places Douglas more
on the side of the angels than Professor Nevins does! The charge
of inconsistency, however, leveled against Douglas in 1860 by
the Republican party may reveal the ground of Douglas's best
justification. For consistency, in any narrow sense, is seldom if
ever the path of wise statesmanship. We may anticipate Douglas's
justification in Winston Churchill's remarks about consistency in
politics, remarks specifically applied to Burke, who had once
attacked the British Court and defended the American Revolu-
tion, then later had defended the French monarchy and attacked
the French Revolution:

46 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

... a Statesman in contact with the moving current of events
and anxious to keep the ship on an even keel and steer a
steady course may lean all his weight now on one side and
now on the other. His arguments in each case when con-
trasted can be shown to be not only very different in charac-
ter, but contradictory in spirit and opposite in direction: yet
his object will throughout have remained the same. His re-
solves, his wishes, his outlook may have been unchanged;
his methods may be verbally irreconcilable. We cannot call
this inconsistency. The only way a man can remain consistent
amid changing circumstances is to change with them while
preserving the same dominating purpose. 4

Let us try then to grasp the dominating purpose of this brilliant,
passionate, tenacious, and flexible man. According to the Illinois
Republican State Central Committee, Douglas had worked
steadily for the containment of slavery from 1845, when he
introduced the amendment incorporating the Missouri Compro-
mise line into the resolutions annexing Texas, until the fourth
of January 1854, when he made his report as chairman of the
Senate Committee on Territories, which introduced a new Ne-
braska bill, "neither affirming nor repealing the eighth section of
the Missouri Act." However, on January 23, 1854, "nineteen days
after he was 'not prepared to recommend a departure' from the
Missouri prohibition," says the Republican State Central Com-
mittee, "Mr. Douglas brought in a new bill, dividing Nebraska
into two Territories Kansas and Nebraska and repealing the
Missouri Compromise . . ." This, says the committee, "constitutes
the turning point in Mr. Douglas's political highway. From this
sharp corner, his course is wholly and utterly pro-slavery, down
to the introduction of the Lecompton bill in the Senate, where
he takes a position of indifference, best expressed in his phrase,
'Don't care whether slavery is voted down or voted up.' The
indifferent mood is preserved a little more than two years, when,
as will be seen by the record, he becomes more wrathfully pro-
slavery than ever before."

We shall then, in the words of another famous American, look
at the record. Before doing so, however, we may be permitted
to hear Douglas "off the record." It is, we believe, essential that
such permission be granted, because Douglas's position as a party
leader always depended upon maintaining an alliance of the
Northwest with the South, even before the breakup of the Whig

SLAVERY 47

party made the survival of the Union depend so heavily upon
the preservation of Democratic harmony. For it was this alliance
which gave each wing of the party the prospect of membership
in a majority coalition, without which either would almost cer-
tainly have been condemned to minority status in the nation.
And an overt condemnation of slavery or expressed hostility to
it would have shattered such an alliance instantly, at any moment
of Douglas's career. In like manner, it would be impossible to do
full justice to Lincoln's policy in the 1850*5 without reading his
off-the-record denunciations of the Know-Nothings. And so, in
1854, in the first shock of the terrific attack by Chase and the
other "Independent Democrats" in Congress upon Douglas's
character and motives, amid the pealing of the tocsin that was
to arouse the spirit of John Brown, a spirit that did not rest until
the institution of slavery was dissolved by the blood of fratricidal
war, Douglas spoke as follows to a young man, the son of an old
friend and benefactor:

I am not pro-slavery. I think it is a curse beyond computation
to both white and black. But we exist as a nation by virtue
only of the Constitution, and under that there is no way to
abolish it. I believe that the only power that can destroy
slavery is the sword, and if the sword is once drawn, no
one can see the end. 5

This "anti-slavery" sentiment, be it noted, came at the moment
of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the supreme "pro-
slavery" action of his life. But, he then observed in this private
interview, repeal also meant that "slavery could no longer crouch
behind a line which freedom dared not cross." By repealing the
implied presumption in favor of slavery south of the line (and
that the Missouri Compromise line implied such a presumption
Lincoln conceded) Douglas expected that freedom would spread
farther and faster. While no such out-and-out anti-slavery senti-
ments can be found in the public records, we are justified in
asking, as we scan those records, whether anything in them is
inconsistent with such an anti-slavery bias. By and large we shall
find that Douglas's record with respect to slavery rests upon two
axioms: first, that the question must be kept out of the halls of
Congress, where it could do only mischief by destroying national
feeling; and, second, that the boundaries of the United States

48 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

must be extended and new territory organized as rapidly as
possible on the basis of popular sovereignty. The connection
between these axioms is this: Douglas believed that the organiza-
tion of new territory would rapidly result in new free states, would
lead to an overwhelming preponderance of freedom over slavery
in the Union and an absorption in the constructive task of filling
and building up the vast continental domain, a task which would
so engage the energies of the nation as to leave the subject of
slavery neglected and largely forgotten.

If one expression were needed for Douglas's policy, it would
not be "popular sovereignty" but "expansion." Indeed, in Doug-
las's political lexicon it would be difficult to distinguish accu-
rately between the two. Expansion was the keynote of Douglas's
foreign policy, popular sovereignty of his domestic policy, but
they were related as the obverse and the reverse of a single coin.
Douglas, more than Lincoln, identified the cause of political
freedom with the freedom then known in the United States and
therefore saw the central domestic task not, as Lincoln saw it,
in preserving or perfecting that freedom, but in spreading it.
Unlike Lincoln, Douglas had little or no confidence in the power
of the American example to bring freedom to other lands or
peoples. For Douglas the only effective security for American
freedom lay in its own physical resources and power, and the
only effective agency for increasing freedom lay in the expansion
of American boundaries. The freedom-seeking oppressed peoples
of the Old World, poured into the indefinitely expansible matrix
of the American constitutional system, would in this way have a
chance to share in enlightened political institutions. It was not
Douglas's custom to indulge in remote speculations, but it is
hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate logical con-
sequence of his foreign policy would have been a federal republic
of the world. Something like the Roman dream of a universal
republic was the driving force behind his policies, but it was a
universal republic in which local autonomy was genuine, not
spurious. The American republic, unlike the Roman, would not
be characterized by the ascendancy or hegemony of any one of
its parts within the whole. The name "American" would belong
originally, and of equal right, to each constituent community. It
was the constitutional equality of each distinct political com-
munity within the federal system which provided the guarantee

SLAVERY 4g

that each accession of territory and population to the Union would
mean an increase of human freedom and welfare. It was this
which made American imperialism, unlike every other imperial-
ism, a blessing to all humanity as well as to itself. It was popular
sovereignty which made expansion both feasible (by disarming
malice and envy) and desirable (by extending republican free-
dom).

But we must now show how, from Douglas's viewpoint, the
policy of expansion also served, in turn, the cause of popular
sovereignty. In the Union as it was when Douglas's political career
in Congress began in 1843, free and slave states were evenly
balanced ( at thirteen each ) . A rising tide of attack upon slavery
in the North was matched by a rising tide of defense of slavery
in the South, a defense which increasingly insisted upon slavery
as a "positive good/* How Douglas saw the political problem
presented by the threat to the survival of American freedom from
abolitionists on the one hand and Calhoun's "positive good" school
on the other may be gathered from these widely circulated
remarks in the Senate in 1848. In the midst of angry criminations
and recriminations by the abolitionist Senator Hale of New
Hampshire, and Calhoun, Foote, and Davis of the southern ultra
side, Douglas addressed his fellow Democrats as follows:

I said that the Senator from South Carolina, by the violent
course pursued here, has contributed to the result which we
deplored, and the abolitionism at the North was built up by
Southern denunciation and Southern imprudence. I stated
that there were men of the North who are ready to take
advantage of that imprudent and denunciatory course and
turn it to their own account, so as to make it revert upon the
South ... I have no sympathy for abolitionism on the one
side, or that extreme course on the other which is akin to
abolitionism. We [Northern Democrats] are not willing to
be trodden down, whilst you hazard nothing by your violence,
which only builds up your adversary in the North. Nor does
he hazard anything; quite the contrary, for he will thus be
enabled to keep concentrated upon himself the gaze of the
abolitionists, who will regard him as the great champion of
freedom ... so that it comes to this, that between those
two ultra parties, we of the North, who belong to neither,

50 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

are thrust aside. Now, we will stand up for all your constitu-
tional rights, in which we will protect you to the last . . .
But we protest against being made instruments puppets
in this slavery excitement, which can operate only to your
interest and the building up of those who wish to put you
down. 6

It is instructive that this essentially moderate and middle
ground of Douglas had already been characterized by the grim
and uncompromising Calhoun as more offensive than abolitionism
itself. The reason is brilliantly exposed by Douglas in the forego-
ing passage: the extremes have a common interest against the
mean. Calhoun's political goal in 1850, the consolidation of
southern nationalism, depended upon the enemy in the North,
abolitionism. The abolitionists, likewise, could not grow strong
without Calhoun's "positive good" school. Southerners like Jeffer-
son or Patrick Henry (or Henry Clay) were not convenient targets
for abolitionist propaganda. Although such men did think that
abolition was incompatible with the safety of the white South
("Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other,"
Jefferson had said), they were willing and even anxious to have
gradual emancipation if some way could have been found to re-
move the freed Negroes; but the last thing that abolitionists
wanted was a responsible statesmanship that would face the very
real question of race adjustment that emancipation would pose.

But Calhoun, before he became an overt disunionist, had been
converted from an American to a southern nationalist. His disci-
ple, Hayne, in the celebrated debate with Webster, had already
identified as the enemies of American liberty those who would
convert this from a federal into a national union. American
nationalism was thus conceived to be the deadly enemy of
southern freedom. But Douglas, like Jackson, was nothing if not a
nationalist. Where, however, southern extremists placed an ex-
treme interpretation of the rights of the states under the federal
Constitution, abolitionists denounced the Constitution out of
hand. The Constitution not only sanctioned slavery but gave
slaveholders the right to represent three persons in the House
of Representatives for every five slaves. This, said the abolition-
ists, meant offering a kind of perpetual bonus for enlarging the
extent of human bondage. Such "compromises" were bargains

SLAVERY rj

with the devil, and the Constitution was a "covenant with hell."
"No Union with slaveholders," cried abolitionists.

Between these upper and nether millstones Douglas sought a
formula of compromise and conciliation. An emergent American
nationality was confronted with this gigantic obstacle of slavery.
The sections would not, he saw, and could not agree upon the
issue itself. The only way out was an agreement to disagree and
a concentration of all loyalties upon that Constitution which safe-
guarded this very precious right the right to disagree. Douglas's
confidential words to young George McConnel are the tacit
premise of his entire policy with respect to slavery: ". . . we
exist as a nation by virtue only of the Constitution, and under
that there is no way to abolish [slavery]." If we would understand
why Douglas in the last analysis seems to sympathize more
with the pro-slavery extreme than with the abolition extreme,
we must remember that the pro-slavery party always took its
stand upon the Constitution, albeit according to its own interpre-
tation. Douglas's rhetoric appealed to a principle that the pro-
slavery party at least recognized. The abolitionists, on the
contrary, appealed to a "higher law," were willing to damn the
Constitution, and admitted no premise to which Douglas might
appeal in the interest of any compromise.

Within the framework of the Constitution, thought Douglas,
the only way to abolish slavery was to appeal to the people of
the states and the territories, who did possess the constitutional
power and right to deal as they wished with it. If abolitionists
could not persuade the people morally and constitutionally com-
petent to deal with slavery, they had no right to address them-
selves to those who were incompetent. It meant appealing from
persuasion to force, the very antithesis of political freedom. To
alter the Constitution, as abolitionists wished, so as to bring
slavery in the slave states under the power of the free states,
meant removing a vital domestic question from the jurisdiction
of a free community because it failed to meet the approval of
those outside that community. Such an appeal was subversive
of the very idea of free government, was the very formula of
arbitrary power. The abolitionists might as well have appealed
to foreign powers to enable them to accomplish their dearest wish.
The genius of the federal system, its ability to extend itself and
freedom simultaneously, lay in the scrupulous observance of this

g2 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

division of federal and local authority and the loyal acceptance
of the decisions of constitutional majorities, however unpleasant,
under the terms of that division. Despite Douglas's frequent
statements to the effect that the slavery question would be de-
cided by the people in each locality on the basis of self-interest,
his appeal to the genius of federalism was in fact an appeal to
self-restraint, to the denial of self-indulgence, to virtue. Like
Lincoln, who once wrote that he bit his lip and kept silent about
slavery as long as the South did no more than exercise its con-
stitutional power over the subject, Douglas too believed that free-
domincluding freedom of speech sometimes depended upon
the ability of men to keep silent.

Since, however, Douglas was indeed the "realist" George Fort
Milton calls him, he had another solution of the problem than a
dependence upon virtue thus conceived. This was the solution
represented by the policy of expansion and was, in essence, an
application of the theory of the Federalist Papers as expressed
in the following passage from #51: "In a free government the
security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious
rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests,
and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security
in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects;
and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country
and number of people comprehended under the same govern-
ment." And so Douglas felt that the danger of disunion and
oppression which loomed large while the contest was between
North and South might be dissipated as and when the country
comprised still other sections. In short, he wished, through ex-
pansion, to submerge factionalism in the melting pot of Union.

The following is from an exchange with Webster in the Senate
in 1850:

We have heard so much talk about the North and the South,
as if those two sections were the only ones necessary to be
taken into consideration, when gentlemen begin to mature
their arrangements for a dissolution of the Union . . . that
I am gratified to find that there are those who appreciate
the important truth, that there is a power in this nation
greater than either the North or the South, a growing, in-
creasing, swelling power, that will be able to speak the law
to this nation, and to execute the law as spoken. That power

SLAVE2RY gjj

is the country known as the great West . . . We indulge in
no ultraisms no sectional strifes . . . Our aim will be to do
justice to all . . , T

The West, Douglas felt, while destined to be free soil, would
not have that factious interest in slavery which characterized the
abolition strongholds in the old free states. Douglas was confident
that his own "plague on both your houses" attitude toward the
old sectional dispute would be the attitude of the new states.
For the West, constituting in this respect a land of third force ( or
faction), would hold the balance between the other two. It would
be able to give overwhelming preponderance to the North in
opposing secession, or to the South in opposing abolition. It would
have no vested interest besides the Constitution and the Union.
The decisive constructive task of statesmanship, in Douglas's
view, was to build the West rapidly enough so that it could
play this role before the disruptive forces in the older sections
became uncontrollable.

Although Douglas never unequivocally denounced slavery as
an evil or curse in public, he once came so close to doing so that
his words should be carefully noted. It was in the same debate
in which Calhoun and Hale figured so prominently in 1848.
Douglas then said:

In the North it is not to be expected that we should take
the position that slavery is a positive gooda positive bless-
ing. If we did assume such a position, it would be a very
pertinent inquiry, Why do you not adopt this institution?
We have moulded our institutions at the North as we have
thought proper; and now we say to you of the South, if
slavery be a blessing, it is your blessing; if it be a curse, it
is your curse; enjoy it on you rest all the responsibility! 8

One feature of this passage is the question it raises concerning
the isothermic theory to which we have adverted above and upon
which Douglas relied increasingly from 1854 onward. According
to that theory, it was both expedient and right for white men
to adopt slavery wherever soil and climate made it profitable.
Here Douglas suggests that the North may have rejected slavery
not because it was unprofitable but because it was a curse. That
slavery, whatever its intrinsic good or evil, was an apple of dis-
cord and thereby a fruitful source of evil to the American

54 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

republic, Douglas certainly believed. But whereas Lincoln in-
sisted upon the public recognition of the intrinsic evil of slavery
as the only sound basis for any and all practical dealings with
the institution, Douglas came increasingly to the conviction that
practical measures directed toward the containment of slavery
could succeed only if they did not involve the abstract question
of the intrinsic good or evil of slavery. This, it would seem, ex-
plains why Douglas never again spoke so openly of the vicious
tendency of the Southern "positive good" school or openly de-
fended his own northern constituents' "right to disagree" on the
intrinsic merits of slavery.

The speech from which we have just quoted was delivered
only a decade before the joint debates. In the intervening period
a number of changes occurred which greatly enforced the wisdom
of this change of tactics. The ground for the conviction that
popular sovereignty meant freedom became, in Douglas's opinion,
immeasurably firmer; and as it did, the need to emphasize this
agreeable truth to the North became proportionately less urgent,
even as it became urgent to avert the gaze of the South from
this disagreeable prospect. What were some of these changes?
First was the admission of California as a free state in 1850,
destroying forever the balance of free and slave states. No less
important was the fact that California had become free by the
completely unsupervised action of the Californians themselves;
i.e., by popular sovereignty. The inhabitants of the new state
were fairly evenly divided between those of free- and slave-state
nativity, but opinion against slavery there was fairly unanimous.
Yet California's political complexion was strongly Democratic,
with a marked sympathy for the political demands of the slave
states. In 1854 both her senators and representatives voted for the
Kansas-Nebraska bill on a heavily sectional vote. Abolitionist
sentiment there was virtually nonexistent. California was free soil
because Mexican labor was cheaper, more economical than slave
labor. And southern California was the only part of the vast Mex-
ican acquisition believed to be suitable to slave culture. Douglas's
increasing emphasis on the dollars-and-cents argumentwhich
involved a willingness to concede the desirability of slavery in
such places as Louisiana, a desirability he implicitly repudiated
in the remarks of 1848 already citedcertainly seems to bear the

SLAVERY gg

impress of the success of popular sovereignty, as an instrument
of freedom, in California.

Another reason for Douglas's shift in tactics in the decade 1848-
58 is the change in his northern constituency, meaning thereby
the whole North, not only Illinois. That change was largely due
to the amazing immigration of that decade. It has frequently been
recorded that in each of the two decades before the Civil War
immigration passed the two-million mark. But immigration in the
ten years preceding the joint debates actually was well over three
million. Of this, 44 per cent was Irish and 33 per cent German.
Douglas was the first and perhaps the most popular national
leader Irish-born Americans have ever had. 9 The Irish went over-
whelmingly into the Democratic camp, although the Whig-
Republican Seward in New York sharply challenged Douglas's
appeal there by taking a strong anti-Know-Nothing stand. And
the Irish, more strongly than any other group in the North, felt
what was probably uniformly if less keenly felt by nearly all
elements of Lincoln's free-soil coalition except the radical aboli-
tionists. This was a hatred of the Negro exceeding the hatred
of slavery. The Irish, who constituted the central reserve of cheap
unskilled free labor, a reserve which pushed forward railroad
development, always a major plank in Douglas's platform, bitterly
detested the thought of competition with Negro labor. The Irish,
therefore, like the great majority of laboring whites of the North,
were against both the spread of slavery, which might have
brought them into contact with Negroes, and against any tend-
ency toward Negro emancipation, which would have had the
same consequence. Douglas had no stronger rhetorical trump in
1858 than the one he sounded at Ottawa, in the first joint debate,
when he said: "Do you desire to turn this beautiful state into
a free Negro colony, in order that when Missouri abolishes
slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves
into Illinois . . . ?"

A further consequence of the vast immigration we have noted
was to render largely theoretical the abolitionist charge against
the Constitution, that in effect it offered, in its three-fifths clause,
a reward for enslavement. This clause in the Constitution had
weighed heavily in the opposition of men like Daniel Webster
to territorial expansion. Lincoln always incorporated Webster s
arguments against the three-fifths clause in his indictment of the
slave power. Yet the vast augmentation of the population of the

56 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

free states, over and above natural increase, by reason of foreign
immigration (for only a tiny fraction of immigrants went into
slave states, where they might have had to compete with black
labor), gave the free states an overwhelming preponderance in
the House of Representatives and in the electoral college. One
Southerner testily remarked that when it was made a capital
crime to import a Negro from Africa it should at least have been
made a felony to bring in an Irishman.

The potato famine in Ireland, the crop failures in Germany,
the abortive European revolutions, particularly in Germany in
1848, all swelled the tide to this country. Until the relatively
short-lived panic of 1857 there was general prosperity, both here
and abroad, during the decade. Great Britain's repeal of the Corn
Laws in 1846, the California gold rush, the Crimean War, all
conspired to place American agriculture under forced draft. The
same forces that enormously expanded the cotton culture of the
South were setting the prairies on fire with the demand for
American grain.

The crisis over slavery was largely brought on by the sharpening
competition, within the American agricultural system, of the grain
and cotton interests for new lands and new laborers. But the
agricultural economy which centered upon grain production ( but
including much more general diversified farming than that
centered upon cotton) was a free-labor economy. In such an
economy both capital and labor were more mobile. The agricul-
tural entrepreneur of the free state could put his capital entirely
into land and equipment. Slavery did not require of him any
capital accumulation for labor, nor did his dignity prevent him
or his children from laboring in their own fields. If he needed
more labor, he could hire it and pay for it out of current produc-
tion. Indeed, the very prosperity of the southern economy in
the fifties made it a poorer competitor in the western territories
where popular sovereignty was to rule. For the skyrocketing of
slave prices made slaves too valuable to risk in regions not pro-
tected by the elaborate system of racial control of the slave states:
slave codes, slave patrols, and judges, juries, and police all
thoroughly devoted to the institution. Moreover, the high prices
of slaves in the fifties also reflected the increasing profitability
of the employment of slaves in the older South, which for nearly
a generation had been mainly concerned with exporting them
to newer regions. In short, never had slaveowners had less in-

SLAVERY 57

centive to risk slaves in places where their tenure might prove
insecure.

Free labor did not need any elaborate system of controls; wages
and profits and the hope of bettering one's lot generated the
conditions for its success spontaneously. The mobility, flexibility,
and spontaneity of the free-labor system meant clearly, as it must
have appeared to the keenly observant vision of Douglas, that
the odds were overwhelmingly in favor of free-stater and free-soil
in any contest for western lands conducted under the rules of
popular sovereignty. In Allan Nevins's words, ". . . it was plain
that if the country held together, every step forward would
strengthen the free society as against the slave society." But pre-
cisely if this were true, does it not mean that the primary task of
statesmanship in this period was to hold the country together
rather than to indulge in moral condemnation of slavery? Nay,
did it not mean to hold the country together even if it required
the condonation of slavery, a propitiation of the slave interest
by a kind of pretended agreement with its prejudices, which
would thus lull it into a false sense of security and thereby give
it a kiss of death? Douglas, during the fifties, had far more ex-
tensive contacts and acquaintances throughout the South than
did Lincoln, and he was impressed, as Lincoln apparently was
not, with the immediate danger from the unreconstructed disci-
ples of Calhoun, who would break up the Union rather than per-
mit the slave states to become a minority.

Douglas had been confronted with this resolve in 1849, when
Calhoun had rallied support for a constitutional amendment
guaranteeing that the number of free and slave states would
always be in balance. It is probable in the extreme that Calhoun
was as much interested in promoting secession as in promoting
the amendment, by laying down an ultimatum to the North upon
which the South would rally. To the idea itself, Douglas then
responded as follows:

As I understand [the Senator from South Carolina] he desires
such an amendment as shall stipulate that, in all time to
come . . . there shall always be as many slaveholding as free
states in this Union. In my opinion, the adoption and execu-
tion of such a constitutional provision would be a moral and
physical impossibility. In the first place, it is not to be pre-

$8 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

sumed that the people of the free states would ever agree to
such an amendment . . . and secondly, if they should, it
would be impossible to carry it into effect. I have already had
occasion to remark, that at the time of the adoption of the
Constitution, there were twelve slaveholding states, and only
one free state, and of those twelve, six of them have since
abolished slavery. This fact shows that the cause of freedom
has steadily and firmly advanced, while slavery has receded
in the same ratio. We all look forward with confidence to the
time when Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and
Missouri, and probably North Carolina and Tennessee, will
adopt a gradual system of emancipation, under the operation
of which, those states must, in process of time, become free.
In the meantime, we have a vast territory, stretching from
the Mississippi to the Pacific, which is rapidly filling up
with a hardy, enterprising, and industrious population, large
enough to form at least seventeen new free states . . . Now
let me inquire, where are you to find the slave territory with
which to balance these seventeen free territories, or even any
one of them? . . . Will you annex all Mexico? If you do, at
least twenty out of twenty-two will be free states, if the "law
of the formation of the earth, the ordinances of Nature, or
the will of God," is to be respected, or if the doctrine shall
prevail of allowing the people to do as they please . . .
Then, sir, the proposition of the Senator from South Carolina
is entirely impracticable. It is also inadmissible, if practicable.
It would revolutionize the fundamental principles of the
government. It would destroy the great principle of popular
equality, which must necessarily form the basis of all free in-
stitutions. It would be a retrograde movement in an age of
progress that would astonish the world. 10

That Douglas in 1858 could make Missouri emancipation a
bogey after regarding it as a logical step forward in an age of
progress in 1849 does not of necessity imply any fundamental
change of view or purpose. The rise of a political party in the
free states whose central unifying principle was hostility to the
institution of slavery was consolidating all political lines in the
South upon the single principle of defense of the institution of
slavery. Douglas's political life depended upon destroying pro- or
anti-slavery tests as the basis of political orthodoxy, North or

SLAVERY 59

South. This meant attacking the attackers of slavery in the North
and the defenders of slavery in the South. It meant political trim-
ming, to be sure. But it was trimming of a high, even noble quality.
To keep the ship of state on an even keel it was necessary at
different times to throw his weight in opposite directions.

Once the Republican party had been formed and had shown
its inherent capacity to carry a national election on the central
rallying point of hostility to slavery (as it had done in 1856 ), n
the problem of political balance was entirely different from what
it had been when the Whig party was a vital force in all parts of
the country. Douglas could say in 1848, almost in so many words,
that slavery was the curse of the South, and then say in 1858
that if he were a citizen of Louisiana he would vote to keep
slavery. But 1848 was the year in which a Louisiana slaveholder
was elected President of the United States as the nominee of the
Whig party. In 1848 there were fifteen free and fifteen slave states.
In 1858 there were no new slave states, but California and
Minnesota had been added to the ranks of the free states. The
entry of Oregon was imminent. By the summer of 1858 the final
rejection of the Lecompton Constitution under the terms of the
English bill meant the definite victory of the free-soil party in
Kansas. There was scarcely a man in the country who soberly and
seriously believed that any of the remaining territory, organized
or unorganized, north of 3&3P" would ever become slave states.
While there might be more doubt concerning New Mexico
Territory because of its more southerly location and its greater
susceptibility to the political pressures of the South, the over-
whelming weight of opinion was that the deserts and mountains
which made up so much of its area would never render slavery
profitable there.

As the conditions making for the certain triumph of the free-
soil movement were growing ever stronger as Douglas viewed the
scene, so were fear and hatred of the Negro, whose ultimate
emancipation was thus apparently becoming assured, growing
worse. This painful and melancholy fact must be faced by the
historian no less than by his subjects. In 1853 the legislature of
Illinois acted to cany out a provision of the state constitution
adopted in 1847. This provision had been adopted in a special
referendum by a vote of more than two to one. The legislature
was authorized to exclude free Negro immigration into the state,
which it now proceeded to do, providing heavy fines for any

60 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

Negro apprehended entering Illinois. Any Negro caught entering
the state who could not pay the fine was to be sold at public
auction to whoever would pay his fine in exchange for the shortest
term of his service. The treatment of the free Negro throughout
the North was steadily worsening. Let it be remembered that
in 1820 virtually the entire North had voted against the admission
of Missouri into the Union, even after the admission of Maine,
and the prohibition of slavery in the remaining Louisiana territory
north of 36'3o", because of the clause in Missouri's constitution
forbidding the entry of free Negroes. For this provision was then
held to violate Article IV, Section 2, of the United States Con-
stitution, which guarantees to the citizens of each state all
privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states. Thirty-
seven years before the Dred Scott decision it was hardly doubted
that Negroes might be among the "citizens of each state" to whom
the Constitution guaranteed "privileges and immunities"! That
Negroes were "so far inferior that they had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect" was an opinion Taney in 1857
attributed to the Revolutionary generation, to men of the stamp
of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and Hamilton, every one of
whom denounced slavery as against the unalienable natural right
of every man, white or black, to liberty! Lincoln was certainly
right when he insisted, against Taney, that opinion in regard to
the Negro had become far more unfavorable than it had been
when the Constitution was framed, and that public opinion was
rapidly becoming what Taney erroneously said it had formerly
been.

In the face of this increasingly unfavorable opinion of the
Negro, however, even in the free states, was not Douglas, as a
popular leader who was necessarily limited to achieving his ends
in and through popular opinion, thereby justified in echoing back
that opinion? Was he not thus justified, particularly when it ap-
peared to him that to oppose such opinion would be destructive
of the free-soil cause itself? For it is practically certain that, had
the conservative rank and file of the free-soil movement become
convinced that the absolute containment of slavery, for which
Lincoln and the radicals stood, involved the immediate or near
prospect of large-scale emancipation, the whole movement would
have suffered a tremendous and possibly fatal shock.

Hatred of the Negro was almost indistinguishable from hatred
of slavery as the dynamic of the Northern free-soil movement

SLAVERY gl

Lincoln's demand for putting slavery where the public mind could
rest in the belief that it was "in course of ultimate extinction"
was compatible with a gradualness of almost indefinite ex-
tent And Lincoln was frequently careful to co-ordinate any
mention of "ultimate extinction" with equally vague suggestions
of the gradual removal of emancipated Negroes to Africa or some
other congenial clime. It has not been sufficiently noted that
Lincoln's advocacy of colonization schemes, apart from its mani-
fest seriousness, also served the practical purpose of gaining
acceptance of the idea of the "ultimate extinction" of slavery by
his rabidly anti-Negro free-soil followers. It made possible thereby
the maintenance in the movement of high moral tone, because
it encouraged the feeling of moral indignation at the Negro's
enslavement, without interfering with the luxury of prejudice
against the Negro himself. But if the free-soil movement had come
to fear that large-scale emancipation might have resulted from
strict confinement of slavery within its existing boundaries, it
would have faced a crisis of its own. A prospect of large-scale
migration of freed Negroes to the North might have turned the
movement toward support of the southern filibustered, who
wished to carve a slave empire in Mexico or Central America.
Douglas desperately attacked this Achilles' heel of Lincoln's argu-
ment; on the one hand attacking the alleged humanitarianism of
the anti-slavery crusade, by insisting upon the immorality of
confining Negroes in the old South, where their rapid natural in-
crease would lead to starvation when they could no longer be
profitably employed there, and on the other by stressing the dan-
ger of freed Negro immigration into the North. Allowing white
men everywhere to use or not to use them, according to their own
best judgment, was Douglas's formula. In the circumstances, this
meant capitalizing chiefly on the anti-Negro feeling of the North,
while Lincoln capitalized chiefly on the anti-slavery feeling
there. The practical coincidence of both feelings should not, how-
ever, be minimized, nor should the fact that both men made
appeals to the other's staple argument. For Douglas did not hesi-
tate to point out how popular sovereignty was achieving freedom
in Kansas, as it had in California; nor did Lincoln hesitate to
abjure all intention to give political or social equality to the Negro
race anywhere in this country. If Lincoln's rhetoric with its
frequent appeals to the universalism of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence seems today to be couched in terms of greater dignity,

62 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

we must remember that it involved the deliberate risk of civil
war, something that Douglas as resolutely undertook to avoid.
Had popular sovereignty been advertised as a free-soil device, it
would have lost all its efficacy as a dampener of sectional strife.
Indeed, the more it became such a device, the more necessary it
became to avoid the appearance, the more necessary it was for
Douglas to insist upon his neutrality on the morality of slavery.
When Calhoun in 1850 spoke of the rights of the South in
the common territories of the nation, Douglas resoundingly denied
that the South or the North had any such rights. The Constitution,
he said, knows only the states and the people. The only ones who
had rights in the territories, he maintained, were the people in
the territories. If the doctrine of popular sovereignty were only
recognized as the true doctine, slavery agitation could be ban-
ished from the halls of Congress and sectionalism effaced. The
gallant stand which Douglas took against Calhoun's determined
and, alas, successful attempt to replace American with southern
nationality in the South must be placed alongside his refusal to
condemn the peculiar institution on moral grounds in the fifties.
His bold attempt simultaneously to open the floodgates of free-
soil expansion and to avert civil war was a dominating purpose
to which all other purposes remained subordinate. Whether right
or wrong, there is a large consistency in all Douglas's dealings
with the "vexed question," a sustained and unchanging concep-
tion of what was good for the nation, to which his individual moral
judgments remained subordinate. And this purpose and this con-
ception command respect for their moral worth, whether or not
we finally accept them as the highest possible moral goals for a
statesman of his time.

Chapter IV
Manifest Destiny

THE foregoing is an explanation of the general principles govern-
ing Douglas's approach to the "vexed question." We believe that
it exonerates Douglas from any charge of shallow opportunism or
moral obtuseness. Certainly no one has the right to denounce his
"moral perceptions" who has not shown, first, that it was wrong
to subordinate the slavery issue, upon which North and South
could not agree, to an aim and purpose upon which they could
agree; and, second, that the aim upon which sectional agreement
and subordination of slavery was pitched was itself immoral. The
emergence of the Republican party foreshadowed the possibility
that there might be a constitutional majority formed without the
necessity of a single vote from a slave state, a majority which
might thus be able to dispense with those restraints which such
a necessity would have imposed. In the developing crisis of the
fifties, Douglas's was the only powerful voice faithful to the idea
that national political platforms must be framed to satisfy the
moral and constitutional sentiments recognized by majority opin-
ion North and South. 1 The least that can be said for the platform
upon which he stood was that it represented the highest common
denominator of sectional agreement. If at last such agreement
proved too slight to preserve the Union without war, it does not
follow that Douglas was at fault for not abandoning it.

The historian has the duty to say those things in behalf of
Douglas's policy which he himself could not say without en-
dangering whatever chances it possessed. When, therefore, the
"Don't care" statements and the "dollars and cents" arguments of
the later fifties are repeated, it is right also to go back to such

64 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

earlier speeches as that of 1849, from which we have quoted,
speeches uncontradicted if unrepeated in later years, in which
Douglas expressed the firm conviction that slavery would be un-
profitable everywhere in the West and even in twenty of twenty-
two possible states that might be carved out of the remainder
of Mexico, should that country be entirely annexed to the United
States. It is also right to emphasize that in 1849 he did not say
economic conditions alone favored freedom. The lands would be
free, he said, either because of soil, climate, and productions or
"if the doctrine shall prevail of allowing the people to do as they
please."

We can think of nothing more damaging to Douglas's reputation
as a statesman than such an explanation of his conduct as the
following by his unreserved devotee, George Fort Milton: "Doug-
las had premonitions of trouble over the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise, but he saw so clearly the inevitable effect climate,
soil and natural productions would have on human institutions in
Kansas and Nebraska that he unduly discounted the effect on the
emotions of men, of aroused fears, passions and hates/' 2 But how
could Douglas, who in 1849 expected slavery to wither away in
Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and North
Carolina, have been seriously convinced that soil and climate ine-
luctably determined moral attitudes toward chattel slavery? There
had been no noticeable change in the soil, climate, or productions
of those states. Either slavery should not have gone there in the
first place or Douglas should not have expected it to wither away,
if there was any truth to the isothermic theory. Nor could the
expansion of cotton culture in the fifties, with the renewed vitality
of the peculiar institution accompanying it, have changed any
well-founded convictions on this subject. The cultivation of cotton
did not require the exclusive use of Negro labor, nor did the utili-
zation of that labor require that Negroes be chattels. Far from
discounting the effect of fear and hate, these were the passions
that Douglas strove to neutralize. What had happened, in
Douglas's view, was that the processes of gradual emancipation,
of gradual attenuation of slavery, were first arrested, then re-
versed, as a result of abolitionist propaganda and the rise of the
free-soil movement in the North. Allowing the people to do as
they pleased was not understood by Douglas to be a policy of
indifference, of voting slavery up or down; it meant voting

MANIFEST DESTINY 6$

slavery down. Under the pressure of the anti-slavery crusade,
however, the South could no longer do as it "pleased." Fear that
control over slavery, control over the process of transformation
in the relation of the races, which Douglas foresaw in 1849, would
be taken out of its hands, had perverted the evolution of moral
sentiment in the South. Douglas's policy, founded upon the
doctrine of popular sovereignty, by guaranteeing to all localities,
North and South, the unquestioned control of their domestic in-
stitutions, would then have looked to the reassertion of this
"normal" anti-slavery opinion, an opinion in conformity with the
"spirit of the age." It is an insult to Douglas's great intelligence
to think that he took with full seriousness the "soil and climate"
argument, a doctrine which seems to have been designed to win
acceptance of popular sovereignty rather than for any independ-
ent merit of its own.

In 1849 it was clear to Douglas that Calhoun's amendment, at-
tempting to give slave states a guarantee of political equality
with free states, would have been a "retrograde movement in an
age of progress which would astonish the world." Douglas, like
Professor Nevins, believed that the tendency of the age was to-
ward freedom. But, as the South's reversal of direction showed,
the problem of how to assure progress, even in an age of progress,
was exceedingly complex. And the future of the Republic in-
volved more than the resolution of the inner cleavage over slavery
and sectional antagonism; it also involved the external antagonism
between a free republic and the forces of despotism, the forces of
predatory imperialism abroad in the world outside the United
States. We must observe now how Douglas's tactics with respect
to slavery formed part of a broad strategy, of advancing the cause
of republican freedom in the mid-nineteenth century.

When Douglas first took his seat in Congress in 1843, the
absorbing question was the annexation (or, according to the
Democrats, "re-annexation") of Texas. It was linked, in the course
of the session, with that of the occupation ( or, again, "re-occupa-
tion") of Oregon. From the ensuing impulse of expansion, the
United States increased its territory upon the continent between
the years 1845 and 1848 from about 1.8 million square miles to
about three million. For the annexation of Texas was presently
followed by the Mexican War and the addition to the Union, by

66 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

conquest and purchase, of California and the territories of Utah
and New Mexico. Meanwhile, a diplomatic settlement with Great
Britain confirmed our title to all of Oregon south of the forty-
ninth parallel. These lands, together with the Gadsden Purchase
of 1853, rounded out our present continental domain and, notwith-
standing much mountain and desert, included some of the fairest
upon this or any other continent. The collapse of the Spanish
Empire in the New World was the primary condition of these
acquisitions ( as it had been that of Louisiana), but the feebleness
and political imbecility of Mexico were the secondary ones.

While in retrospect it may seem inevitable that such a vacuum
of power would be filled by the virile force of the nascent Ameri-
can republic, the rapid occupation of these vast spaces must
have dazzled the imagination in 1848, as it certainly dazzled that
of Stephen A. Douglas. A nation that might expand by nearly a
million and a quarter square miles in three years might surely
be expected to expand by some millions more in, say, a century!
Such at least was the impact of the forties upon the horizon of
Douglas, the background of his plans and projects in the fifties.
Without appreciating Douglas's vision of future American empire,
and Lincoln's reaction to it, one cannot grasp the scope or magni-
tude of the issues between them.

In 1843 we had no recognized titles to any of the afore-
mentioned lands and the question of whether the United States
would be of continental extent was as unsettled as most of the
disputed territory. West of the Mississippi only Louisiana, Arkan-
sas, and Missouri had become states. While it was reasonably
certain that the tier of Louisiana states on the west bank of the
Mississippi would be extended to the Canadian border, as it was
by the admission of Iowa in 1846 and Minnesota in 1858 (after
territorial organization in 1849), *h ere was no clear national
intention that the political organization of states would ever pro-
ceed further. Most of the remaining Louisiana territory was
secured "in perpetuity" to Indian tribes by treaty and lay unor-
ganized and wild. Only by the acquisition of the Pacific coast was
the die cast that made it economically and politically necessary
for the United States to develop the vast heartland west of the
Mississippi to the Rockies, the center of which, Kansas and
Nebraska, was to supply the immediate issue over which Lincoln
and Douglas were to clash.

Before the annexation of Texas and the consequent embroil-

MANIFEST DESTINY 67

ment with Mexico, the whole question of westward expansion
was unresolved. The decision in favor of expansion is today so
much taken for granted that it is difficult for us to realize how
deeply it divided the country at the time. Today it is almost in-
conceivable that we should be involved in a foreign war in which
the President would be denounced as the aggressor and the
foreign enemy referred to as the victim by leading members of
the political opposition. Lincoln's denunciation of Polk, in the
House, comes very close to what both a later and an earlier age
would call treason, or at least criminal disloyalty. And, it is fair
to add, Lincoln as President put men in jail for criticisms of his
administration no more severe than his of Polk. The division over
the Mexican War was a foreshadowing of the Civil War.

Wholly apart from the question of the profit from, or loss of,
the immensely valuable Mexican lands to the west and south were
the questions whether the area now embraced by the United
States would eventually consist of one ocean-bound republic or
several; whether British power in North America would equal or
exceed that of the United States; and whether Mexico, with none
of the Anglo-Saxon traditions or capacity for self-government or
civil liberty, would one day give her law and civilization to the
entire American Far West and Southwest. Together, these com-
prised the question of whether the political future of North
America would be divided or subdivided among a number of
widely differing regimes and relatively equal powersor powers
sufficiently equal so that, with alliances, they might hope to
balance or overcome each other or whether the continent would
be subject to the overmastering hegemony of one giant republic.
While the Whigs, whose greatest spokesman was Webster, op-
posed the annexation even of Texas, the exponents of Manifest
Destiny, than whom none was more articulate than Douglas,
spoke without hesitation of the acquisition of the whole of Can-
ada, Mexico, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean.

Douglas's speech on Texas annexation is, for the most part,
an elaborate legalistic justification: the original Louisiana Pur-
chase had included Texas and a guarantee of United States
citizenship to all inhabitants of the territory ceded by France, but
in 1819 we had traded Texas and the Texans to Spain in exchange
for Florida, thus violating our plighted national faith. Because of
this justification, Douglas would not, he said dwell

68 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

upon the numerous advantages that would attend the annex-
ation of Texas, in stimulating the industry of the whole
country; in opening new markets for the manufactures of the
North and East; in the extension of commerce and naviga-
tion; in bringing the waters of the Red River, the Arkansas,
and other streams flowing into the Mississippi, entirely with
[in] our territorial limits; in the augmentation of politi-
cal power; in securing safer and more natural boundaries, and
avoiding the danger of collisions with foreign powerswith-
out dwelling upon these and other considerations, appealing
to our interests and pride as a people and a nation, it is
sufficient argument with me that our honor and violated
faith require the immediate re-annexation of Texas to the
Union.

In contradiction to Webster's repeated warnings that "it is of
very dangerous tendency and doubtful consequences to enlarge
the boundaries of this country" and that there "must be some limit
to the extent of our territory, if we would make our institutions
permanent," Douglas replied:

... in regard to the extension of territory. He regarded all
apprehensions unfavorable to the perpetuity of our insti-
tutions from this source as ideal. The application of steam
power to transportation and travel has brought the remotest
limits of the confederacy, now comprising twenty-six states
(if we are permitted to count by time instead of distance)
much nearer to the center than when there were but thirteen.
The revolution is progressing, and the facilities and rapidity
of communication are increasing in a much greater ratio than
our territory or population. 3

By a strange paradox, we find the heir of Jefferson, via Jackson,
defending the expansion of the Union in terms of the technological
revolution, while the heir of Hamilton, Webster, was to ask:

What sympathy can there be between the people of Mexico
and California and the inhabitants of the Valley of the
Mississippi and the Eastern States in the choice of a Presi-
dent? Do they know the same man? Do they concur in any
general constitutional principles? . . . Arbitrary government
may have territories and distant possessions, because arbi-
trary governments may rule them by different laws and

MANIFEST DESTINY 60

different systems. Russia may rule in the Ukraine and the
provinces of the Caucasus and Kamtschatka [the Russian
name for Alaska] by different codes, ordinances, or ukases.
We can do no such thing. They must be of us, part of us,
or else strangers. 4

Thus the arch-Whig, the Publius of the Federalist Papers redivi-
vus, employing the classic argument of the party that opposed
adoption of the Constitution! The idea that liberty was essentially
local, dependent upon intimacy, was the argument of Jeffersonian
democracy, the argument that justified, if not opposing the Con-
stitution, at least construing the powers of the federal government
so narrowly as to leave it little to do beyond providing for the
common defense. Jeffersonian democracy involved moreover a
preference for agriculture over other occupations, because an
agricultural society was precisely the kind in which the tasks of
the federal government could be kept minimal.

When in 1837 Webster first spoke against the annexation
of Texas, he said he believed the Founders of the republic never
intended it to include states from any lands not possessed by the
Union in 1787. The Louisiana Purchase he attributed to the
necessity to control the mouths of the rivers that rose in the
western states, the navigation of which was vital and had already
been disputed. The acquisition of Florida was due, he said, to a
like, if less urgent, necessity. Webster apparently gave little
thought to the possibility that the Founders would have wished
to expand the boundaries of the Union to secure advantages for
manufacturing, commercial, or shipping interests. Perhaps Jeffer-
son would have advised against such a policy, but we cannot help
believing that it would have been warmly endorsed by Hamilton.
The strict constructionist principles of Jefferson fit the idea of a
relatively loosely knit union, because an agricultural society
is relatively independent in its parts, the states or sections. By
comparison with an industrial society, its parts exchange little of
their agricultural surpluses with each other and much with for-
eign nations who supply them with manufactured goods. In the
Hamiltonian union, there is much greater interdependence, much
more internal trade, many more and different interests to regulate
and adjust, much more of a common good, and hence a great deal
more for the federal government to do. The Hamiltonian union
must, therefore, be a much stronger union, stronger because of

70 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

the power the central government must have if its business is so
much greater, and stronger because of the loyalties it must com-
mand if its decisions are to be accepted. Clay's "American
system," to which Webster was vigorously committed, was the lin-
eal descendant of Hamilton's Report on Manufactures.

Webster's intense ultramontane unionism was thoroughly con-
sistent with this inheritance, but his view of the territorial
confinement of the Union was, in itself, anomalous. Hamilton's
protectionist views implied the desirability of a high degree of
autarchy; but autarchy meant bringing under one's own domina-
tion as much of one's market and sources of supply as possible.
Hamilton would never have shrunk from expansionism in pursuit
of such goals. In 1798 he had a bold scheme for entering the
war then raging in Europe on the side of Britain: ". . . in co-
operation with the Venezuelan patriot Francisco de Miranda, the
allied American and British fleet would liberate Spanish America
and annex Florida and Louisiana as our share of the conquests
. . . [and the] wavering West, grateful for the Mississippi River
freed at last, would be securely attached, not only to the United
States, but to their benefactors, the Federalists.'^ Hamilton's un-
inhibited imperialism would have been after Douglas's heart. The
irony is that the torch for such imperialism should have been
carried forward in the name of Manifest Destiny by Jefferson's
party. We venture the hypothesis that it was the acquisition of
Louisiana under Jeffersonian instead of Hamiltonian auspices,
rather than any profound and principled opposition to expansion
as such, which turned Federalist- Whig foreign policy into one of
traditional hostility to all projects of aggrandizement. The West
was indeed grateful to its benefactors, but they were the wrong
benefactors, from the Federalist-Whig viewpoint! Moreover, it
was Federalism, whose historic mission was to convert a loose con-
federation into a strong union, that, soured by defeat and
frustration, engendered the first potent secession movement. Like
the vision of Macbeth beholding the royal line which was to de-
scend from Banquo, Louisiana became a nightmare to unrecon-
structed Federalists in which a procession of new states entered
the Union, firmly wedded to the interests, convictions, arid party
espoused by the hated Jefferson. Later the embargo and the War
of 1812 gave new intensity to New England Federalism's sense of
hopeless submersion in the Union, and the Hartford Convention
may have proved abortive only because of the sudden ending of

MANIFEST DESTINY 71

the war. There were few arguments in favor of secession, except
those relating directly to slavery, that did not have a trial in New
England before 1815, prior to their employment in the South in
1861.

The split between Hamilton and Adams, which ended any hope
for Hamilton's scheme of entry into the European war in 1798
on the side of Britain, gave a sharper twist to the course of our
history than the wrecking of the Federalist party, sharp as that
was. It meant that this country's partnership with Great Britain
in maintaining a balance of power in the world favorable to the
development (or survival) of free political institutions, a ruling
fact of the twentieth century, did not strike deep roots until the
Civil War. Lincoln's administration was to mark a turning point
in Anglo-American relations, as in almost every other aspect of
American politics.

The anti-British animus of the Revolution had died in the
breasts of men like Washington, Adams, and Hamilton almost as
soon as the treaty of peace was signed. In the wars of the French
Revolution their sympathies were markedly Anglophile, while
those of Jefferson's party were Francophile. While both Washing-
ton and Jefferson strove to maintain American neutrality, the
electoral revolution of 1800, which enthroned Jefferson's party
for a quarter century, meant that American foreign policy
was "neutral against" the British. The embargo struck at the
British, for example, who controlled the seas, rather than the
French. And fighting for the freedom of the seas in 1812 meant,
concretely, aiding Napoleon. But it is the legacy of that war
for domestic politics that must command our attention here.
As in the Revolution, the British in 1812 supplied whisky, money,
and leadership "to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the
merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an un-
distinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions." As a
result, hatred of the British and hatred of the Indians became
almost indistinguishable passions among frontiersmen in ensuing
decades. The West that would have been gained in partnership
with Britain, had Hamilton prevailed, looked upon Britain as a
deadly enemy. Jackson was raised to power in large measure be-
cause of his reputation as a fighter against both British and
Indians. The importance of this reputation may be better ap-

72 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

predated by remembering that when in 1840 the Whigs finally
did break the Jacksonian hold on the presidency it was by run-
ning another supposedly successful Indian fighter, "Old Tippe-
canoe" Harrison. In that campaign the Whigs did not bother to
have a platform, except "log cabins" and "hard cider." To such as
these was their imperishable rhetoric largely devoted, as well as
to such alleged facts as that the Easterner, Van Buren, wore lace
shirts. The Whigs' only other presidential victory was also won
with a successful general who was minus a platform. And
although Taylor is better remembered for his Mexican War ex-
ploits, he too had done many years' service on the Indian frontier.
Jacksonian democracy thus had a deeper anti-British motivation
than the rather intellectual and pacifistic Anglophobia of Jeffer-
son. And its roots were deeper than the experience even of the
frontier.

"The nucleus of Jacksonian democracy," writes Professor Wil-
fred E. Binkley, "was an ethnic group, the Scotch-Irish stock.
These were the descendants of the unfortunates . . . harried from
their Ulster homes and finding refuge in the American wilder-
ness, where they nursed an undying hatred of their British
persecutors. The rifles that blazed across the cotton-bale breast-
works at New Orleans on January 8, 1815 and mowed down the
redcoat lines were to them but the avenging instalments of a
just God in the hands of the faithful. Jacksonian democracy knew
no stronger emotional bond of unity than its universal hatred of
the British. It was peculiarly appropriate that the eighth of
January became the fixed date of the annual party banquet." 8

It is more than curious that all the greatest Whig names e.g.,
Adams, Webster, Clay, Harrison and Tyler, Taylor and Fillmore,
and Lincoln were of predominantly English ancestry. It is only
in the opposite party that we find other ethnic strains conspicuous
among the leaders. Jackson and Polk were both of Scotch-Irish
descent, Van Buren Dutch, Buchanan Scotch, among the presi-
dents. Even Jefferson traced his ancestors to Wales. Calhoun
was of Scotch-Irish stock and, although for a time after his break
with Jackson he joined the Whigs, it should be remembered that
he was Jackson's first Vice-President. Douglas, of course, bore one
of the most famous of all Scottish names. It is amusing that, al-
though Winfield Scott was the last full-fledged Whig candidate
for President (1852), he was not of the covenanting breed of
Caledonian, whence came the Jacksonians, but was descended

MANIFEST DESTINY 73

from a follower of the Pretender who fled to America after Cul-
loden in 1746. We would not wish to push the ethnic thesis
too far. Henry Clay, Lincoln's beau ideal of a statesman, was
a leader of the "war hawks" of 1812 along with Calhoun. Mani-
fest sectional interests frequently make the quest for subtler in-
fluences superfluous. It is a fact of some impressiveness, however,
that from Washington to Lincoln, the Federalist- Whig-Republi-
can presidents are exclusively of English ancestry.

In the light of this fact and that of a contrary quality in the
opposite party, it is not surprising to learn that the nativism flour-
ishing in the decades before the Civil War was largely "old Eng-
lish stockism" and made its appeal mainly to groups that were
traditionally Whig. When Fillmore, the last Whig President, ran
again in 1856, it was not only as candidate of the moribund
Whigs but of the "Americans" i.e., Know-Nothings. One of the
great accomplishments of the Republicans in 1860 was in assimilat-
ing, for the most part, both the old-line Whigs and the Know-
Nothings of the free states. This, even more than the split among
the Democrats, was the key to their victory. The foregoing also
makes intelligible the fact that it was the Democratic party which
in the forties and thereafter welcomed the floods of Irish into
its fold. These Irish did not, to say the least, detract from the
anti-British feelings of the older Jacksonians in the party. They
probably did contribute to minimizing the older anti-episco-
pal feelings, and made the animus more exclusively ethnic. Or,
if religious feelings continued to play a role, they did so by mak-
ing the Democratic party more hospitable to Catholics, while the
nativism which weighed heavily upon the opposition took on an
increasingly anti-Catholic bias. Lincoln wrote to his old friend
Speed in the summer of 1855:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be?
How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be
in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress
in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation,
we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We
now practically read it "all men are created equal, except
negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read
"all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners,
and Catholics" When it comes to this I should prefer emi-
grating to some country where they make no pretence of lov-

74 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

ing liberty to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be
taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. 1

What has been insufficiently noticed in this widely quoted pas-
sage is that Lincoln, in writing to the man who was once his
closest personal friend, should find it necessary to make such an
elaborate disavowal of anti-foreign and anti-Catholic prejudice. It
suggests how common this charge must have been against old-
line Whigs. And one must not forget that this, Lincoln's only
thoroughgoing written denunciation of Know-Nothingism, was in
a personal private letter. On July 21, 1860, Lincoln addressed
a letter to Abram Jonas, a prominent Jewish attorney of Quincy,
Illinois. In it Lincoln gives a circumstantial denial of ever having
stopped at a Know-Nothing lodge in Quincy. But he ends with
these words: "And now a word of caution. Our adversaries think
they can gain a point, if they could force me to openly deny
the charge, by which some degree of offence would be given to
the Americans. For this reason it must not publicly appear that
I am paying any attention to the charge." 8

Lincoln wanted and expected the Know-Nothing vote, but it
was no indiscriminate desire that motivated him. There was a kin-
ship between the roots of nativism and the roots of the anti-slavery
movement, as there was between both of these and the temper-
ance movement The mid-nineteenth century witnessed a whole
host of such "reform" movements, and the movement against
slavery was hardly more virulent or fraught with more political
consequences until its climactic phase than the movements
against liquor and foreigners. In many cases the crusade against
liquor and the crusade against Irishmen ( and, to a lesser extent,
Germans, who also had a reputation for bibulousness ) tended to
merge into one. The groups that warred against liquor tended
also to war against slavery. Lincoln took the stump against liquor
before he did so against slavery. As the slavery question became
his overriding concern he became silent on the liquor question,
particularly as German immigration came to swell the Republi-
can ranks. But he served cold water to the committee that notified
him of his nomination for President. It would have been extremely
difficult for Lincoln to attack the temperance movement or the
nativist movement without dividing the forces of the anti-slavery
movement

The abolitionist movement in America, like the anti-liquor

MANIFEST DESTINY 75

movement, was in large measure an offshoot of similar movements
in Great Britain. The dynamic force animating both in Britain
was the evangelical movement among the dissenting sects.
Abolitionism in particular spread to America with the spread of
evangelism and was thus strongly identified with radical Protes-
tantism. The Irish reciprocated the scorn of the temperance
reformers and the nativists by hating them for their English
affinities and their Protestantism, as they in turn were hated for
their popery and alleged addiction to drink. Thus the Irish tended
also to hate abolitionism as something English and Protestant and
therefore intolerant of themselves. It is worth mentioning, al-
though it would be difficult to measure its significance, that slavery
was not held to be contrary to natural law, according to the most
famous of Catholic doctors, Thomas Aquinas, while it was cate-
gorically denounced as such by the English Protestant John Locke,
whose Second Treatise of Civil Government so largely inspired
the famous phrases of the Declaration of Independence.

Douglas, we have said, was a great hero of the Irish and, we
might add, was as well known to be a hard drinker as Lincoln
was notorious for his teetotaling! Moreover, Douglas's second
marriage after the death of his first wife was to the daughter of
a prominent Maryland Catholic family, and the two sons of his
first marriage were educated in a Catholic school and eventually
adopted their stepmother's faith. But Douglas showed his political
colors in nothing more revealingly than when he twisted the
British lion's tail.

We return now to Douglas's Texas annexation speech and find
that the peroration has almost no apparent connection with what
has preceded it, although it should not surprise the reader of the
foregoing paragraphs, as it assuredly did not surprise Douglas's
followers:

Our federal system is admirably adapted to the whole con-
tinent; and while I would not violate the laws of nations,
nor treaty stipulations, nor in any manner tarnish the national
honor, I would exert all legal and honorable means to drive
Great Britain and the last vestiges of royal authority from the
continent of North America, and extend the limits of the re-
public from ocean to ocean. I would make this an ocean-
bound republic, and have no more disputes about bounda-
ries or red lines [i.e., British claims] upon the maps. 9

76 IKE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

If we ask what Britain had to do with Texas, we must remind
ourselves that in the presidential election of the autumn (1848)
preceding this speech Henry Clay and the Whigs had come to
grief mainly upon the Texas annexation issue. The Democratic
party rallied from the defeat of 1840 above all by espousing this
issue and by linking it with the occupation of the whole of Oregon,
all the way to 54'4o", thus balancing southern with northern ex-
pansion. Clay's misfortune was due in large measure to his failure
to appreciate how popular the annexation of Texas would be,
even in the North. Here again the anti-British feeling of Jacksonian
Democracy undoubtedly played a leading role, for the rumors
of a threatened alliance of the Texans with the British, should
annexation fail, seems to have acted as a great lever upon opinion.
To the South, it meant the exposure of their "soft underbelly"
to abolitionism, and the specter of the Canadian border, the
sanctuary of fugitives, suddenly reproduced along the border of
their densest slave populations. Slavery was not so firmly planted
in Texas that it might not become more advantageous for Texans,
if thrown upon the British, to substitute the free labor system.
But in the Northwest the old anti-British feelings also stirred, for
British power in Canada could have far greater strategic effect
if it could be applied simultaneously from Texas. In the Northeast
there was fear of a Texan tariff on American goods while British
goods entered free. And so support for Texas's annexation was
redoubled, both by the prospect of cutting off any flanking
movement of British power to the south and by the simultaneous
move further to offset British power to the north by the occupa-
tion of Oregon.

Although Douglas warmly supported Texas's annexation, as a
northwestern Democrat he naturally espoused the cause of Ore-
gon with even greater enthusiasm. Here is an extract from an
Oregon speech. The repetitiveness is worthy of inclusion because
it indicates how incessantly he hammered at the anti-British
theme:

It therefore becomes us to put this nation in a state of defense;
and, when we are told that this will lead to war, all I have
to say is this, violate no treaty stipulations, nor any principle
of the law of nations; preserve the honor and integrity of
the country, but, at the same time, assert our right to the
last inch [of Oregon, that is], and then, if war comes, let it

MANIFEST DESTINY 77

come. We may regret the necessity which produced it, but
when it does come, I would administer to our citizens Han-
nibal's oath of eternal enmity, and not terminate the war
until the question was settled forever. I would blot out the
lines on the map which now mark our national boundaries
on this continent, and make the area of liberty as broad as
the continent itself. I would not suffer petty rival republics
to grow up here, engendering jealousy of each other, and
interfering with each other's domestic affairs, and continually
endangering their peace. I do not wish to go beyond the great
ocean beyond those boundaries which the God of nature
has marked out, I would limit myself only by that boundary
which is so clearly defined by nature. 10

To "drive Great Britain and the last vestiges of royal authority
from the continent of North America," to "make this an ocean-
bound republic," to render "the area of liberty as broad as the
continent," and not to suffer "petty rival republics to grow up
here" was a policy of a scope and import of the first magnitude
and one which Douglas was to pursue with fierce tenacity and
energy.

Let us reflect on this broad purpose. Lincoln is justly famous for
preserving the Union to which Douglas was no less dedicated.
Lincoln in 1861 refused to allow this Union to be divided into
"petty rival republics," but we must credit Douglas, and all those
others who espoused the cause of Manifest Destiny, with the
vision and determination that created the continental Union that
Lincoln finally saved. In giving this credit we must, in fairness,
also remember that Lincoln and his party (i.e., the Whigs) did
not have such a vision. They warned, as with the voice of Webster,
that territorial expansion would undermine the principles of a
free republican government. The annexation of Texas alone meant
the certain addition of one slave state and the possible addition
of five slave states, since the annexation resolution permitted
Texas's future division. The compromise with the original slave-
holding states, which added to the number of free inhabitants
three fifths of the slaves in calculating representation in the House
of Representatives, would prove a monstrosity if it were not
sharply circumscribed, said Webster. "But," he added,

there is another consideration of vastly more general impor-
tance . . . because it affects all the States, free and slave-

78 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

holding; and it is, that States formed out of territories thus
thinly populated . . . break up ... the intended relation
between the Senate and the House . . . The Senate, aug-
mented by these new Senators coming from States where
there are few people, becomes an odious oligarchy. It holds
power without any adequate constituency ... it is but
"borough-mongering" upon a large scale ... I hold it to be
... an outrage upon all the principles of popular republi-
can government . . , u

Again we must be struck by the fact that, just as Douglas saw
clearly the implications of the technological revolution for trans-
portation, so he also saw that the new West to be carved out of
Mexico would not long remain the few sparse settlements that
were there then but would rapidly become the home of teeming
millions. By 1850 the miracle of California showed that the Far
West was no more apt to change the representative character of
the Senate than the old Northwest or Southwest. Meanwhile, as
we have already noted, the mighty influx from Europe into the
free states was making the argument against the three-fifths
clause highly abstract.

Douglas's intention to extend the area of liberty was not an
idle one either: the American constitutional system knew no way
to acquire "provinces," in the old Roman sense. Congress had
power to admit new states, and all lands acquired were to be
presumed states, in statu nascendi. Moreover, the Constitution
knew no way to admit states except upon the footing of full
equality. Just because of this assurance of equality of old with
new states, American imperialism had a moral quality unlike any
other imperialism the world had ever known. What if California
and the other Mexican cessions were in reality a conqueror's booty
(not that Douglas would have admitted so much)? Was not the
admission of these regions into the Union a guarantee to them
of a republican form of government? The political condition of
Mexico, as Douglas viewed it, was one of virtual and perpetual
anarchy. The United States, in the Monroe Doctrine, had warned
European powers that they might not re-establish dominion on
any soil in the New World from which they had been expelled.
To stand by the doctrine, however, meant to accept responsibility
for the political stability of the regions from which we insisted
others must be excluded. The political credo announced in the

MANIFEST DESTINY 79

Declaration of Independence, it should be remembered, asserted
a right against anarchy no less than against despotism. TThe acces-
sions of parts of Mexico to the United States did not mean a
denial of self-government to the inhabitants of these regions but
the first effective assurance of self-government they would have
had. Suppose there was some temporary distortion in our federal
system resulting from these accessions. Was the risk not worth it?
Douglas sensed the drift of world politics toward massive ag-
gregations. He did not, like Tocqueville, foresee a bi-polarity
centering in the United States and Russia, but he did see that
the old European balance of power would not endure indefinitely.
The great competitor was Britain, whose star of empire was rising
toward its zenith. Nothing less than complete domination of the
Western Hemisphere would assure this country's future. Expan-
sion was necessary, not only as a solution of the leading domestic
question but as the policy, both morally right and politically
necessary, of giving political freedom the power of survival in a
predatory and hostile world.

Of all Webster's arguments against expansion, the most telling
has to do with slavery. Webster tacitly rejected Douglas's claim
that expansion would make the area of liberty as broad as the
continent, because he foresaw the outspreading of the institution
of chattel slavery. Not the three-fifths clause nor the perversion
of the Senate from its representative basis, but the arming of
the interest in chattel slavery was the true danger. In the 1837
speech against annexing Texas the following classic passage oc-
curred, a passage often repeated in later years and to a considera-
ble extent paraphrased by Lincoln in his great Peoria speech of
1854:

Gentlemen, we all see that, by whomsoever possessed, Texas
is likely to be a slave-holding country; and I frankly avow my
entire unwillingness to do anything that shall extend the
slavery of the African race on this continent, or add other
slave-holding States to the Union. When I say that I regard
slavery in itself as a great moral, social, and political evil,
I only use language which has been adopted by distinguished
men, themselves citizens of slave-holding States. I shall do
nothing, therefore, to favor or encourage its further extension.
We have slavery already amongst us. The Constitution found

80 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

it in the Union; it recognized it and gave it solemn guaranties.
To the full extent of these guaranties we are all bound, in
honor, in justice, and by the Constitution. All the stipulations
contained in the Constitution in favor of the slave-holding
States which are already in the Union ought to be fulfilled
. . . Slavery, as it exists in the States, is beyond the reach of
Congress. It is a concern of the States themselves; they have
never submitted it to Congress, and Congress has no rightful
power over it ...

But when we come to speak of admitting new States, the
subject assumes an entirely different aspect. Our rights and
duties are then both different.

The free States, and all the States, are then at liberty to
accept or reject. When it is proposed to bring new members
into this political partnership, the old members have a right
to say on what terms such new partners are to come in, and
what they are to bring along with them. In my opinion, the
people of the United States will not consent to bring into
the Union a new, vastly extensive, and slave-holding country,
large enough for a half a dozen or a dozen States. In my opin-
ion they ought not to consent to it ... On the general
question of slavery, a great portion of the community is
already strongly excited. The subject has not only attracted
attention as a question of politics, but it has struck a far
deeper toned chord. It has arrested the religious feelings of
the country; it has taken strong hold on the consciences of
men. He is a rash man, indeed, and little conversant with
human nature, and especially has he a very erroneous esti-
mate of the character of the people of this country, who
supposes that a feeling of this kind is to be trifled with or
despised. It will assuredly cause itself to be respected. It
may be reasoned with, it may be made willing ... to fulfill
all existing engagements and all existing duties . . . But to
coerce it into silence, to endeavor to restrain its free expres-
sion . . . should this be attempted, I know nothing, even in
the Constitution or in the Union itself, which would not be
endangered by the explosion which might follow.

I believe it to be for the interest and happiness of the whole
Union to remain as it is, without diminution and without
addition. 12

MANIFEST DESTINY 8l

Without at present considering the intrinsic merit of what Web-
ster has said, we call attention to what he has omitted; namely, the
alternative danger, the expansion of British influence. The elec-
tion of 1844, as noted above, was to suggest that anti-British
as well as anti-slavery feeling was a deep and durable element
in popular opinion. In truth, popular opinion was not altogether
consistent with respect to the compatibility of all the objects it
wished to achieve, as it seldom is. The task of statesmanship,
in part, is to clarify the alternatives that are before the country
and to compel the people to a genuine and not a spurious or
illusory choice. While Webster gave ear and voice to the deep-
toned chord of anti-slavery opinion, Douglas beat the tribal
drums of anti-British feeling. While Douglas prodded Southerners
to follow his expansionist policies, by reminding them that Britain
was the home of abolitionism, Webster "wished that this country
should exhibit to the nations of the earth the example of a rich,
and powerful republic, which is not possessed by a spirit of
aggrandizement." Yet Webster tacitly accepted the proposition
that the spread of British influence south of our borders would
be wholesome rather than harmful, precisely because the spread
of British influence would be likely to arrest the spread of slavery.
It is difficult to escape the feeling that, as between Websterian
Whiggery and, later, Lincolnian Republicanism and Douglas
Democracy a profound difference, perhaps the profoundest dif-
ference, lay in the differing relative estimate placed upon slavery
on the one hand and the British Empire on the other as threats
to the future of American freedom. For Douglas, Britain was the
great enemy, and differences over slavery had to be subordinated
to meet her; for Webster, as for Lincoln, the enemy was the
slave power.

There is an astonishing disparity between the seriousness with
which Lincoln's contemporaries heard his warning in 1858 of a
danger that they might wake up one morning to find slavery
lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as
South, and the unbelief, not to say contempt, with which that
warning has been treated by recent historians. This has been
paralleled, if not quite equaled, by the treatment of Douglas's
conviction that the future welfare of the country demanded an
exclusion of Britain from North America, if not from the Western
Hemisphere. Except for noting his advocacy of Manifest Destiny,
even Douglas's sympathetic biographers have given short shrift

82 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

to his long Senate speeches on foreign policy. Yet there is every
reason to believe that Douglas himself regarded them as of the
utmost importance and that, as senator, his responsibilities in the
field of foreign affairs were not surpassed in dignity and gravity
by any others. Douglas was, moreover, the recognized chieftain
of a movement known as "Young America/' a movement largely
unofficial and unsanctioned by himself but devoted both to ad-
vancing his presidential prospects and to asserting a more vigor-
ous foreign policy than that of the "old fogies" of the party.

That Douglas's warnings against British guile and greed had a
deep response can hardly be doubted, and we must try to com-
prehend why what seems so unsubstantial a fear today did not
seem so then. That a war to drive "the last vestiges of royal
authority" from North America was a supreme aim of policy for
Douglas, we have seen. But it is worth remembering that in 1861
William H. Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State and the leading
Republican in the nation until the nomination of Lincoln, pro-
posed measures aimed at provoking war with several European
powers, measures which must in fact have been directed mainly
against Britain. 13 Seward's motive, presumably, was to arouse
national feelings as a means to ending the secession crisis. Yet
he must have seen the same potentialities in an anti-British policy
that Douglas did.

To appreciate why Douglas and countless others felt as they
did we must recapture something of the international outlook
of the mid-nineteenth century. Although it was an "age of
progress," actual progress toward political freedom elsewhere in
the world, progress toward realizing the rights proclaimed in the
Declaration of Independence was extremely doubtful and uncer-
tain. Webster said in 1824:

It cannot be denied that the great political question of this
age is that between absolute and regulated governments . . .
The main controversy is between that absolute rule, which,
while it promises to govern well, means, nevertheless, to gov-
ern without control, and that constitutional system which
restrains sovereign discretion, and asserts that society may
claim as matter of right some effective power in the establish-
ment of the laws which are to regulate it. The spirit of the
times sets with a most powerful current in favor of these
last mentioned opinions. It is opposed, however, whenever

MANIFEST DESTINY 83

and wherever it shows itself, by certain of the great poten-
tates of Europe . . , 14

Webster spoke these words in support of a resolution of sympathy
with the embattled Greek revolutionists fighting for freedom
against their Turkish oppressors. In their fight, the Greeks met
the active hostility of the Christian crowned heads of the Holy
Alliance as well as their infidel imperial masters.

While the "spirit of the times" may have been on the side of
freedom, its prospects before the American Civil War could
hardly have been called bright. The downfall of the first Napo-
leon had ushered in a period of intensely reactionary government.
Napoleon himself had done much to discredit those principles
of the French Revolution which were so nearly identical with
the principles of the American Revolution. When the spirit of
liberty again took heart, the members of the Holy Alliance, learn-
ing nothing and forgetting nothing, undertook to suppress it by
every and all means. The revolutions of 1830 and 1848 proved
largely abortive. If the Bourbons were finally run out of France,
the Second Republic nonetheless proved short-lived; and what-
ever enlightenment was to be attributed to Napoleon III did
not include much political freedom. Meanwhile, British diplo-
macy and British power were frequently exerted in favor of some
of the worst and most oppressive governments in putting down
the efforts of their subjects to assert their natural rights. That
Britain herself, after the fright of Napoleon subsided, moved
slowly but steadily down the path toward constitutional democ-
racy was a fact neither dear nor unequivocal in these years. The
full meaning of the Reform Act of 1832 was not visible immedi-
ately at so great a distance. The social system of Great Britain
was enormously unegalitarian. "In those days," said Disraeli,
"England was for the few and for the very few." It was hardly
the home of republican freedom as known to men like Douglas
and Lincoln, who, without wealth or birth or influential connec-
tions, made their way to the highest positions. Briefly and crudely
we may say that, prior to the Third Republic, France's erratic
progress toward equality was not accompanied by much liberty;
that Britain exhibited a good deal of liberty without much
equality; while in the United States alone were liberty and
equality substantial realities of social and political existence.

Within this mid-century horizon Lincoln and Douglas would

84 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

have agreed that the American republic had a unique responsi-
bility, that it held in trust the cause of republican freedom for
all mankind. Americans could not view with indifference the
struggle for liberty of men anywhere in the world. Lincoln would
surely have agreed fully with the following passage from Doug-
las's Senate speech (December 11, 1851) on the Kossuth resolu-
tions:

I do not deem it material whether the reception of Governor
Kossuth will give offence to the crowned heads of Europe
... for I well know that they will not be pleased with any
action of this republic which gives encouragement to Euro-
pean movements favorable to liberal institutions ... Sir, I
know of no principle of the law of nations that deprives a
republic of the right of expressing its cordial sympathy
in all movements tending to the establishment of free princi-
ples throughout the world. I hold it is our duty to demon-
strate our heartfelt sympathy and profound admiration, by
every act which is appropriate to the occasion and the
subject-matter. It is due to our own character, in vindication
of the history of our revolutionary struggles, which resulted
in the establishment of republican principles upon this con-
tinent. 15

For Lincoln had spoken earlier, of the right of revolution, as
follows:

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power,
have the right to rise up and shake off the existing govern-
ment, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a
most valuable, a most sacred right a right which, we hope
and believe, is to liberate the world. 16

But the classic statement of how the American example was to
sow the seeds of revolution throughout the world is Webster's
famous Hiilsemann letter, vindicating the action of the American
government in sending an "observer" to Hungary, an observer
whom the Austrians accused of actively abetting the patriot cause.
Writing in 1850 as Secretary of State, Webster said he freely
admitted that

in proportion as these extraordinary events appeared to have
their origin in those great ideas of responsible and popular

MANIFEST DESTINY 85

government, on which the American constitutions themselves
are wholly founded, they could not but command the warm
sympathy of the people of this country . . . They could not,
if they desired it, suppress either the thoughts or the hopes
which arise in men's minds, in other countries, from contem-
plating their successful example of free government . . .
True, indeed, it is, that the prevalence on the other continent
of sentiments favorable to republican liberty is the result of
the reaction of America upon Europe; and the source and
center of this reaction has doubtless been, and now is, in
these United States. 17

For Webster and Lincoln, however, the central responsibility of
America in advancing what Lincoln distinctly referred to as a
world revolution was to inspire the hearts of men, to hold forth
to them the assurance that a republic, a political order devoted
to the freedom and happiness of all its members, was not only
possible but actual. European liberals might look to America for
inspiration and sympathy and, where they succeeded, prompt
recognition. But America ought not to jeopardize this precious
example of republican freedom by rash adventures. Its primary
action upon the international scene was to be moral, not political.
At this point there is a sharply differing emphasis of far-reaching
importance in Douglas's speeches. Douglas did not, of course,
think we could actually rescue the Hungarian patriots from the
clutches of the Russian and Austrian emperors. But he clearly
favored a more belligerent tone in all pronouncements upon the
conflict abroad between liberal and reactionary forces. For Doug-
las, the test of republican purity and fidelity was to be found more
in the vigor with which we asserted ourselves against anti-
republican forces abroad than in any introspective concern.
Lincoln, on the contrary, expanding Webster's theme, summoned
his countrymen to the great crusade which began in 1854, as fol-
lows:

Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let
us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit,
if not the blood, of the Revolution . . . Let us re-adopt the
Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and
policy, which harmonize with it ... If we do this, we shall
not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved
it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.

86 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of
free happy people, the world over [our italics], shall rise up,
and call us blessed, to the latest generations. 18 *

Because the Kansas-Nebraska Act, with its implied rejection of
the Declaration of Independence, "deprives our republican exam-
ple of its just influence in the worldenables the enemies of free
institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites," it was
a blow at America's foreign policy, no less than against its true
domestic policy, according to Lincoln. With Douglas, however,
the uncompromising insistence upon purity finds a no less
vehement but characteristically different expression. In the same
speech on the Kossuth resolutions, from which we have quoted
above, Douglas spoke as follows:

Sir, something has been said about an alliance with England,
to restrain the march of Russia over the European continent.
I am free to say that I desire no alliance with England, or
with any other crowned head. I am not willing to acknowl-
edge that America needs England as an ally to maintain the
principles of our government. Nor am I willing to go to the
rescue of England to save her from the power of the Autocrat,
until she assimilates her institutions to ours. Hers is a half-way
house between despotism and republicanism. She is respon-
sible, as much as any power in Europe, for the failure of the
revolutionary movements which have occurred within the
last four years. English diplomacy, English intrigue, and Eng-
lish perfidy, put down the revolution in Sicily and in Italy,
and was the greatest barrier to its success even in Hungary
... I am utterly averse to an alliance with her to sustain her
monarch, her nobles, and her privileged classes. She must
sustain her constitutional monarchy, even against absolutism
without receiving aid from republican America with my con-
sent, and especially so long as she condemns to imprison-
ment and transportation for life the noble Irish patriots,
whose only crime consisted in attempting that for which the
great Hungarian is now idolized by the English people. She
must do justice to Ireland, and the Irish patriots in exile,
and to the masses of her own people, by relieving them from
the oppressive taxation imposed to sustain the privileged
classes, and by adopting republican institutions, before she
can have my sympathy, much less my aid, even against Rus-

MANIFEST DESTINY 87

sia. I wish no alliance with monarchs. No republican move-
ment will ever succeed so long as the people put their trust
in princes. The fatal error committed in Italy, Germany, in
France, wherever the experiment was tried, consisted in
placing a prince at the head of the popular movement. The
princes all sympathized with the dynasties from which they
were descended, and seized the first opportunity to produce
a reaction, and to betray the people into the hands of their
oppressors. There is reason to believe that much of this was
accomplished through British diplomacy and intrigue. What
more natural? The power of the British Government is in the
hands of the princes and nobility. Their sympathies are all
with the privileged classes of other countries, in every move-
ment which does not affect the immediate interests of their
own kingdom. Republicanism has nothing to hope, therefore,
from England so long as she maintains her existing govern-
ment, and preserves her present policy. I repeat, I desire
no alliance with England. We require no assistance from her,
and will yield none to her until she does justice to her own
people. The peculiar position of our country requires that we
should have an American policy [the italics are Douglas's]
in our foreign relations, based upon the principles of our
own government, and adapted to the spirit of the age. We
should sympathize with every liberal movement recognize
the independence of all Republics form commercial treaties,
and open diplomatic relations with them protest against all
infractions of the laws of nations, and hold ourselves ready
to do whatever our duty may require when a case shall
arise. 1

k 18b

A present-day reader of the foregoing passage must be struck
by the resemblance between what Douglas calls an "American
policy" and the foreign policy advocated by the movement called
"America First" prior to World War II. The persistence of this
theme in American politics is astonishing. In both centuries we
see a refusal to join Britain in opposing a threatened destruction
of the European balance of power by an autocratic continental
power. In both cases there is visible the resentment of non-Anglo-
Saxon nationalities against the idea of war for the sake of British
interests, and the conviction of a radical opposition between
British and American interests. There is, moreover, the peculiar

88 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

insistence upon the direct moral claim of American principles of
government upon the governments and peoples of Europe,
combined with a kind of revulsion from the entire European scene
and a withdrawal of American diplomacy, of such power as
America could exert through alliances upon that scene in behalf
of liberal movements. And in both cases there is the same insist-
ence that America's true reaction to the failure of European
liberalism is to be found in establishing an incontestable hegemony
in the Western Hemisphere. There is, moreover, a difference
between the foregoing policy and the classic "isolationism" of
Washington's and Jefferson's neutrality policy and of its quasi-
reaffirmation in the Monroe Doctrine. ITie earlier policies were
meant to secure the infant republic from rash adventures, from
overcommitments which might needlessly endanger our security.
Douglas's policy, on the contrary, looked toward involvement, be-
cause it was a summons to a crusade to expel European powers
from the New World.

For Douglas, Britain's "half-way house between despotism and
republicanism" is the analogue of Lincoln's "house divided." When
Webster in 1823 said the greatest question of the age was that
between absolute and limited government, he thought "whether
the form of government shall be that of limited monarchy, with
more or less mixture of hereditary power, or wholly elective or
representative, may perhaps be considered as subordinate." For
Douglas, however, this "subordinate" question was paramount.
Lincoln, in the letter to Speed, spoke of going to Russia, where
he could "take his despotism pure, without the base alloy of
hypocrisy.*' Lincoln would not tolerate the impurity represented
by successive exceptions to the universal creed of the Declaration
of Independence. Douglas's defenders have frequently contrasted
his flexibility, as represented by his policy of allowing diversity in
the domestic institutions of the states, with Lincoln's doctrinal
rigidity. Lincoln did oppose Douglas's popular sovereignty, be-
cause it countenanced, in theory at least, the spread of slavery;
and Lincoln did demand the ultimate extinction of slavery. But
while Lincoln looked to the assimilation of slave to free institutions
within the United States, Douglas demanded that Great Britain
"assimilate her institutions to ours"! Each man, we might say,
called for the elimination of a divided house and denounced what
he believed hypocritical betrayal of liberal principles; but whereas

MANIFEST DESTINY 80

W 57

Linooln saw the fatal division and betrayal at home, Douglas saw
them concentrated in "perfidious Albion."

In his Texas and Oregon speeches, one could say that Douglas
was simply voicing Jacksonian prejudices, but by 1850 experi-
ence had given those prejudices if they were such a new
dimension and a new plausibility. The revolutions of 1848 had
largely failed; bloodshed, persecution, and oppression seemed
more than ever the fate of European patriots and liberals. But
of all events, none left a deeper mark upon American politics
than the Irish famine. Here was a human catastrophe of gigantic
proportions. The history of American Negro slavery disclosed no
such physical suffering as the starvation and deaths in vast
numbers of the Irish peasantry. Nor is it likely that the enforced
separation of families, frequently accounted the worst evil of
slavery, equaled in a hundred years the separations caused by
the enforced emigration from Ireland. That the sufferings of the
Irish were attributable to British misrule was widely conceded.
And that Douglas, as the spokesman of the Irish in America
should, in the scale of human abominations, subordinate the op-
pression of Negroes to that of the people of his own constituents
is hardly a paradox of democratic government

Certainly it was no mere chauvinism to believe at mid-century
that the political structure of the Old World was too rotten to
expect any great transplantation to it of the blessings of the New.
The continued growth of the New World, the viability of whose
free institutions was demonstrated fact, was the true aim of policy.

I insist that there is a difference, a wide difference [said
Douglas], between the system of policy which should be pur-
sued in America and that which would be applicable to
Europe. Europe is antiquated, decrepit, tottering on the
verge of dissolution. When you visit her, the objects which
enlist your highest admiration are the relics of past greatness;
the broken columns erected to departed power . . . The
choicest products of her classic soil . . . bring up memories
of the dead, but inspire no hope for the living! Here every-
thing is fresh blooming, expanding, advancing ... Sir, the
statesman who would shape the policy of America by Euro-
pean models, has failed to perceive the antagonism which

9O THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

exists in the relative position, history, institutions in every-
thing pertaining to the Old and the New World. 19

The foregoing is from a speech in the special Senate session
summoned by the incoming President, Pierce, in March 1853. The
debate on foreign policy which had marked the closing months
of the Thirty-second Congress, the last under Fillmore and a Whig
administration, had been resumed. A controversy had arisen with
Britain concerning the interpretation of the Clayton-Bulwer
Treaty, which had been signed and ratified in the spring of 1850.
This treaty was probably the most unpopular of all our inter-
national agreements, at least until Yalta achieved the peak of its
ill fame. We shall shortly hear from Douglas precisely why this
was so. We should note, however, that it was negotiated and
signed amid the gravest internal crisis through which the nation
had hitherto passed. It was a Whig treaty, presented to a
Democratic Senate, and yet passed by a vote of 42 to 11. This
suggests that Whigs and "old fogy" Democrats alike believed in
a prudent abatement of national assertiveness while the domestic
peril lasted. This was to be Lincoln's view in the next decade,
but it was certainly not Douglas's view, then or ever. The delib-
erations of 1850 were secret, but Douglas tells us in 1853 what
he had said before, and these views are expanded on other
subsequent occasions of record.

But here is another point of chronology which must command
notice. Between Douglas's two major speeches in 1852-53 on for-
eign affairs there occurred the last unsuccessful attempt to pass
a bill to organize Nebraska. It passed the House by an over-
whelming margin and failed in the Senate by being laid on the
table in the closing hours of the sessionin fact, in the early
hours of the morning of March 3. This bill, of which we shall
take further notice later, was warmly endorsed by Douglas,
although it had not a word casting doubt upon, much less repeal-
ing, the Missouri Compromise. The Nebraska bill of 1853,
however, did not command a fraction of the attention of Douglas
(or of anyone else) that its famed successor did; his preoccupa-
tion this year was far more with foreign affairs. We shall later
expound the view that the repeal provision in 1854 was an
aberration from Douglas's true policy; that he never intended
it, but that a peculiar set of unhappy circumstances forced him
to profess to have intended it, after the fact, and so defend it.

MANIFEST DESTINY gi

The storm that broke over it was to place Douglas's policy in
a false perspective, subordinating a major to a minor theme. He
was never again able to push the foreign policy he so dearly
believed in, although he never abandoned the attempt

We would venture as a hypothesis that Douglas, at the end
of the Thirty-second Congress, while the lame ducks awaited
the return of the Democrats to power in 1853, wished to set the
stage for the reassertion of Manifest Destiny. The platforms of
both parties in 1852 had asserted that the Compromise of 1850
would be regarded as a definitive settlement of sectional differ-
ences. Pierce, in his inaugural address, gave grounds for hoping
that Folk's policies would be resumed. But in the following year
the Democratic party was rent by internecine feuds and Pierce
disclosed his utter incompetence in dealing with them. What the
country needed desperately was a policyand leadership. The
Whig party had immolated itself in the fires of sectionalism by
taking the lead in, and throwing its weight behind, the Compro-
mise of 1850. The Democratic party appeared to be disintegrating
while in power. A vigorous policy with other nations seemed
out of the question. Congress could take the lead in forging
domestic policy, as it could not in the foreign sphere. Douglas
therefore undertook to exert a leadership in 1854 u P n an issue
he could hope to control through his place in the party and in
the Senate. That Douglas was playing the "presidential game"
is neither doubtful nor discreditable; what is important is its
significance and success for Douglas, whether as a Democrat or,
as was possible in 1858, as Republican, would have meant the
reassertion of the primacy of foreign policy. As we shall later
show, Lincoln always understood this, and no passages in the
joint debates are more meaningful than those in which Lincoln
places his own construction upon Douglas's ulterior motives in
the external sphere. For this reason it is essential, before turning
to the language of the debates, to hear what Douglas said on
foreign affairs in 1852-53, in the interval between the domestic
crisis of 1850 and its renewal in 1854.

The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, like that other Whig treaty nego-
tiated in 1842 by Webster and Lord Ashburton, was a settlement
of a broad area of irritating and ulcerating differences with Great
Britain, differences which could easily have led to war but were
as easily removed from that dangerous condition as soon as the

92 THE CASE FOB DOUGLAS

principle of compromise was accepted. The 1842 agreement had
settled the long-festering dispute over the northeast boundary,
between Maine and Canada, a dispute which seemed hopelessly
irreconcilable under Democratic administrations but was almost
magically dissipated by the diplomacy of Webster and the con-
genial Ashburton. In 1850 the aftermath of the Mexican War
brought not only the domestic sectional controversy but a serious
clash of British and American interests in Central America. In
the words of Allan Nevins:

California had no sooner been acquired than a large emigra-
tion began to pour across the Panama and Nicaraguan routes.
The building of a canal then seemed a much easier enter-
prise than it actually was, and most Americans inevitably
felt that it ought to be under their own control. Great Britain
for her part exercised sovereignty over Belize, or British
Honduras, asserted a protectorate over the savages who in-
habited the so-called Mosquito Coast, and took an interest
in the islands of the region. The British had the largest ocean
commerce in the world, and no small part of it would pass
through any Isthmian canal which was constructed. 20

The heart of the ensuing treaty was a stipulation that neither
Britain nor the United States would "ever obtain for itself any
exclusive control over any ship canal," but that both would
protect any private company which might undertake to build
it. It was also agreed that "the parties owning or constructing the
same shall impose no other charges nor conditions of traffic than
the aforesaid governments shall approve as equitable," and that
"the said canals or railways [shall be] open to the citizens and
subjects of Great Britain and the United States on equal terms,
[and] shall also be open on like terms to the citizens and subjects
of every other state." 21 The "self-denying ordinance" upon which
the storm of criticism mainly broke, however, was the following:

The governments of the United States and Great Britain
hereby declare that neither one nor the other will ever . . .
occupy, or fortify, or colonize, or assume, or exercise, any
dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast,
or any part of Central America . . .

The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, in short, was founded upon the as-
sumption that Anglo-British friendship was the durable basis

MANIFEST DESTINY 93

upon which the international system of the New World might be
built As Clayton wrote to Bulwer at the time, "We have pro-
duced a new era in the history of the relations between Great
Britain and the United States. We have bound together these
two great kindred nations as joint pioneers and partners in spread-
ing the blessings of commerce and civilization.'* 22 Disillusionment
with the treaty set in almost immediately for Clayton, Webster,
and the Whigs, as well as for Democrats. The Americans thought
that the self-denying ordinance applied to present as well as
prospective colonies, etc., while the British interpreted it to mean
future ones only; in short, the British meant to retain all the
strategic advantages of their existing bases in the vicinity of the
Nicaraguan route. But whether the treaty froze existing British
advantages in the region or gave us full equality, there can be
no question that its Whig authors never looked for more than a
full partnership in the area.

The protectorate of the Mosquito Coast included more than
half the area of Honduras and Nicaragua, on the Atlantic side.
Britain's foothold here (in addition to full possession of Belize,
or British Honduras) was, nominally, to prevent the Nicaraguans
and others from exterminating the Mosquito Indians. In this situa-
tion the Nicaraguans were quite willing to concede to Americans
exclusive privileges in the region as an offset to British power.
And Douglas wished to pay the British that sincerest form of
flattery, imitation, by exploiting native weakness in order to estab-
lish an American overlordship that would exclude the British as
effectually as the British were in the habit of excluding others. Ac-
cording to Douglas, speaking in the Senate on February 14, 1852,
one Hise, Folk's charg6 d'affaires (under Buchanan's administra-
tion of the State Department) had already negotiated a treaty
with Nicaragua, giving this country exclusive and perpetual
privileges to build and fortify a canal there, together with land
grants for the establishment of free ports and towns at the termini
of the interoceanic communications. That such a "treaty" would
have been the prelude to another Texas, that the "colonists" would
eventually have taken the country from the natives, Douglas was
at no pains to deny or conceal Nor was Douglas unmindful that a
treaty with Nicaragua, without a prior understanding with Great
Britain, would hardly be worth the paper it was written on. Before
the Clayton-Bulwer agreement the British had already obtained

94 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

from the Nicaraguans navigation rights on the San Juan River
entirely inconsistent with the privileges which were now to be
bestowed on the Americans. 23 But here, as in the Oregon bound-
ary controversy, Douglas only wanted a scrap of evidence to
supply a claim under what he was pleased to call "international
law," upon which extravagant demands might be based, demands
serving to bring on war. Here are Douglas's main objections to
the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, in his own words:

In the first place, I was unwilling to enter into treaty stipula-
tions with Great Britain or any other European power in
respect to the American continent, by the terms of which we
should pledge the faith of this republic not to do in all coming
time that which in the progress of events our interests, duty,
and even safety may compel us to do. I have already said,
and now repeat, that every article, clause, and provision of
that treaty is predicated upon a virtual negation and repudia-
tion of the Monroe Doctrine in relation to European coloni-
zation on this continent. The article inviting any power on
earth with which England and the United States are on
terms of friendly intercourse to enter into similar stipula-
tions, and which pledges the good offices of each, when
requested by the other, to aid in the new negotiations with
the other Central American states, and which pledges the
good offices of all the nations entering into the "alliance"
to settle disputes between the states and governments of
Central America, not only recognizes the right of European
powers to interfere with the affairs of the American continent,
but invites the exercise of such a right, and makes it obliga-
tory to do so in certain cases. It establishes, in terms, an
alliance between the contracting parties, and invites all other
nations to become parties to it. I was opposed also to the
clause which stipulates that neither Great Britain nor the
United States will ever occupy, colonize or exercise domin-
ion over any portion of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito
Coast, or any portion of Central America. I did not desire
then, nor do I now, to annex any portion of that country to
this Union . . . Yet I was unwilling to give the pledge that
neither we nor our successors ever would . . . California
being a state of the Union, who is authorized to say that
the time will not arrive when our interests and safety may

MANIFEST DESTINY gg

require us to possess some portion of Central America, which
lies half way between our Atlantic and Pacific possessions,
and embraces the great water lines of commerce between
the two oceans?

And further:

But there was another insuperable objection to the Clayton
and Bulwer Treaty ... I allude to the article in which it
is provided that "The government of the United States and
Great Britain, having not only desired to accomplish a par-
ticular object, but also to establish a general principle, they
hereby agree to extend their protection, by treaty stipula-
tions, to any other practicable communications . . . across
the isthmus which connects North and South America . . ."

According to Douglas, this clause extended the treaty to include
not only Central America but Mexico on the north and New
Granada (Colombia and Venezuela) on the south. Since the
treaty recognized a partnership not only with Britain but with
any other foreign powers with whom Britain or the United States
was friendly and who wished to join, then, he said,

the American continent shall have passed under the protec-
torate of the allied powers, and her future made dependent
upon treaty stipulations for carrying into effect the object
of the alliance, [and so] Europe will no longer have cause
for serious apprehension at the rapid growth, expansion, and
development of our federal Union. She will then console
herself that limits have been set and barriers erected beyond
which the territories of this republic can never extend, nor
its principles prevail.

It would be difficult to imagine words more expressive of the
underlying assumptions of Douglas's entire political career than
the foregoing, in which he co-ordinates the extent of the territory
of our republic with that of its principles. Not only did Douglas
believe that Europe was rotten to the core, but he had no regard
whatever for the political capacity of the Latin Americans, apart
from the fostering hand of the United States.

I do not meditate or look with favor upon any aggression
upon Mexico . . . But who can say that, amid the general
wreck and demoralization in Mexico a state of things may

96 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

not arise in which a fust regard for our own rights and safety,
and for the sake of humanity and civilization, may render it
imperative for us to do that which was done in the case of
Texas . . , 24

The principal assumption underlying Whig diplomacy, we have
said, was the desirability of permanent friendship with Great
Britain. In the continuation of the debate in the March special
session Douglas dealt with this as follows:

... I do not sympathize with that feeling which the senator
expressed yesterday, that it was a pity to have a difference
with a nation so friendly to us as England [Douglas's empha-
sis]. Sir, I do not see the evidence of her friendship. It is
not in the nature of things that she can be our friend . . .
Sir, we have wounded her vanity and humbled her pride.
She can never forgive us. But for us, she would be the
first power on the face of the earth . . . She is jealous of
us, and jealously forbids the idea of friendship . . . why
close our eyes to the fact that friendship is impossible while
jealousy exists? Hence England seizes every island in the
sea and rock upon our coast where she can plant a gun to
intimidate us or annoy our commerce. Her policy has been
to seize every military and naval station the world over . . .
Does England hold Bermuda because of any profit it is to
her? Has she any other motive for retaining it except jealousy
which stimulates hostility to us? Is it not the case with all
her possessions along our coast?

In the same debate he replied to a remark of Senator Butler,
that England was the "mother country," in this vein:

I can not recognize England as our mother. If so, she is and
ever has been a cruel and unnatural mother. I do not find
the evidence of her affection in her watchfulness over our
infancy, nor in her joy and pride at our everblooming pros-
perity and swelling power since we assumed an independent
position. . . . But, that the Senator from South Carolina, in
view of our present position and of his location in this con-
federacy, should indulge in glowing and eloquent eulogiums
of England ... is to me amazing. He speaks in terms of
delight and gratitude of the copious and refreshing streams
which English literature and science are pouring into our

MANIFEST DESTINY 07

country and diffusing throughout the land. Is he not aware
that nearly every English book circulated and read in this
country contains lurking and insidious slanders and libels
upon the character of our people and the institutions and
policy of our government? Does he not know that abolition-
ism, which has so seriously threatened the peace and safety
of this republic, had its origin in England, and has been
incorporated into the policy of that government for the pur-
pose of operating upon the peculiar institutions of some of
the states of this confederacy, and thus render the Union
itself insecure? Does she not keep her missionaries perambu-
lating this country, delivering lectures, and scattering broad-
cast incendiary publications, designed to incite prejudices,
hate, and strife between the different sections of this Union?
I had supposed that South Carolina and the other slavehold-
ing states of this confederacy had been sufficiently refreshed
and enlightened by a certain species of English literature,
designed to stir up treason and insurrection around his own
fireside, to have excused the senator from offering up praises
and hosannas to our English mother! 25

Douglas did not give up this theme until he had wrung it a good
deal harder, but we abstain from further quotation. This passage
does, however, illustrate how a number of separate strands were
woven into the thread of Douglas's policy. We have already seen
him contend that England's aristocracy had betrayed the liberal
movements in Europe, that their class loyalties, except when in
conflict with national advantages, took precedence over any
feeling for political freedom. But here we find the most virulent
hatred of England as the home of abolitionism, although abolition-
ism had its home in the middle and lower classes, certainly not
in the aristocracy. Slavery was abolished throughout the British
colonies (it was mainly concentrated in the West Indies) in 1833,
by the first Parliament elected after the great act of reform, an
act representing the first major step by Britain toward democracy
in the nineteenth century.

The language which Douglas uses to describe English "mission-
aries" recalls the expressions and tone of the old "tory" Federalists
toward the Jacobins, the same Federalists who passed the Alien
and Sedition Laws, and is familiar in our day in the attitude and
regard toward Communists. In short, Douglas regarded Britain

98 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

as both reactionary and revolutionary. This may seem inconsist-
ent; but, if so, it is only a superficial inconsistency. Douglas saw
British diplomacy conducted by the old ruling classes, who would
support liberal causes abroad if they happened to coincide with
British interests; e.g., by weakening the hands of rival monarchi-
cal powers. But they would with equal or greater alacrity
sacrifice those same causes when no selfish advantage promised
to accrue from them. These rulers of Britain had no more sympathy
for republican freedom in America than for Russian autocracy.
British abolitionism was unleashed upon America in precisely the
same spirit in which the revolutionaries of eastern Europe were
supported against the Czar. The "humanitarian" spirit which
abolished slavery in the British West Indies cost nothing to the
parliamentarians in Westminster, who did not have to live among
the emancipated Negroes. The West Indian slaveholders were not
asked to give their consent, which would never have been given,
and the power exerted by Parliament to secure abolition was as
autocratic, as little based upon the consent of the governed, as
the Stamp Act or the tax on tea which precipitated the American
Revolution.

Since Douglas identified political freedom with the greatest
degree of local autonomy, the coincidence of the emergence of
the forms of British democracy with abolition caused him to re-
gard the former in the light of the latter. Douglas no doubt
construed the quality of British democracy very much in the light
which abolitionism cast upon democracy in this country, for the
political aim of abolitionism in America was, quite clearly, to
convey to the federal government the power to do to the southern
slave states what the Parliament at Westminster had done to the
Bahamas. Hardly a man before the Civil War believed the
Constitution gave the federal government power over slavery in
the states, but if a militant anti-slavery party controlled all
branches of the federal government, how long would that belief
continue? Or, more concretely, if such a party controlled the
formation and growth of new states, how long would it be before
three fourths of the states would have the power and the will
to change the Constitution so as to give the federal government
this power? Does not the Thirteenth Amendment give the
answer?

Douglas's remarks last quoted were directed against Butler of
South Carolina, who sat in the seat once occupied by Calhoun.

MANIFEST DESTINY 99

Butler's Anglophilism reflected the community of taste and feeling
of the plantation aristocracy with the British gentry that stood
the South in good stead during the Civil War. And Butler also
reflected the anti-expansionist feeling common among many of
the largest slaveholders of the South and slavery's most rigorous
defenders. Calhoun himself did not wish any annexation beyond
Texas, concerning which he was no more than lukewarm. He
knew in 1850 that his proposal for an amendment to keep the
slave and free states in balance would never be accepted. And
so Calhoun and the conservative wing of the extreme pro-slavery
school of the South always saw that their protection within the
Union against that three-fourths constitutional majority lay more
in limiting the number of future states than in seeking new
territory, which might or might not become slave states. As we
shall again notice, the strongest slavery men in Congress (and
out of it) never wished the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
for its retention enabled them to block the further organization
of the West altogether. They were driven to support a measure
they hated, because the issue was taken out of their hands when
opposition to it became the rallying cry of the abolitionists. We
here see Douglas trying to beat down the conservative pro-slavery
resistance to expansion in Central America and the Caribbean
and trying also to beat down the spirit of conciliation with Eng-
land, as he later overcame resistance to the organization of the
western states, with the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

We conclude our excerpts from Douglas's major foreign-policy
pronouncements with some passages from a speech in December
1858, the month following the election in which he defeated
Lincoln for the Senate. It was in New Orleans, the city whence
the Cuban filibusterers were wont to sail. In this speech his
language regarding future annexations was less restrained, if pos-
sible, than in the Senate: Cuba, Mexico, Central America (as
far as Cape Horn, we should guess! ) were all certainly included
in Manifest Destiny. In passing he recounted a conversation with
Sir Henry Bulwer that occurred in 1850.

He took occasion to remonstrate with me that my position
with regard to the treaty was unjust and untenable; that the
treaty was fair because it was reciprocal, and it was reciprocal
because it pledged that neither Great Britain nor the United

1OO THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

States should ever purchase, colonize, or acquire any territory
in Central America. I told him that it would be fair if they
would add one word to the treaty, so that it would read that
neither Great Britain nor the United States should ever oc-
cupy or hold dominion over Central America or Asia. But
he said, "You have no interests in Asia." "No," answered I,
"and you have none in Central America." "But," said he,
"you can never establish any rights in Asia." "No," said I,
"and we don't mean that you shall ever establish any in
America." 26

This speech concludes with a peroration in which Douglas says,
with one qualification, that he is in favor of an indefinite expan-
sion in which "the more degrees of latitude and longitude
embraced beneath our Constitution the better," in which "the
principles of free trade [shall] apply to the important staples
of the world [our italics], making us the greatest planting as
well as the greatest manufacturing, the greatest commercial as
well as the greatest agricultural power on the globe." There was
but one thing that would modify this advocacy: ". . . but I am
not in favor of that policy unless the great principle of non-
intervention and the right of the people to decide the question
of slavery and all other domestic questions for themselves shall
be maintained."

We thus see explicitly co-ordinated, just after the end of the
great debates, what was implicitly co-ordinated almost from the
outset of Douglas's career: popular sovereignty and expansion.
But the co-ordination of these two, in the light of a full reading of
Douglas's speeches on foreign affairs, casts added light upon the
doctrine of popular sovereignty. For Douglas clearly intended a
different kind of union from that conceived by Lincoln. Lincoln,
like Webster, thought in terms of greater homogeneity, because
he thought in terms of sharply circumscribed boundaries; and
he accepted these because, in the Whig-Federalist tradition, he
tacitly accepted Britain's partnership in deciding vital matters
affecting the American future.

Douglas's union would have been a new kind of Rome. Unlike
the British Empire, it would have been radically democratic, and
yet it could not admit the peoples of all the lands it absorbed
into full civic privileges. "If experience shall continue to prove,
what the past may be considered to have demonstrated, that those

MANIFEST DESTINY 1O1

little Central American powers can not maintain self-government,
the interests of Christendom require that some power should
preserve order for them." 27 Precisely how self-governing Ameri-
cans would deal with the natives when they took over Central
America, Mexico, etc., Douglas does not say. What is clear,
however, is that the variety, not only in soil, climate, and pro-
ductions, but of peoples, that American expansion would involve
would require policies of great suppleness and flexibility. The
absolutely necessary condition of such flexibility, and the one
condition which could be dealt with contemporaneously, was a
policy of local self-determination, of popular sovereignty, as
Douglas used the term. That the spread of the federal Union
to new lands and climes would have involved us in more con-
spicuous exceptions to general egalitarianism did not disturb
Douglas. Why should it? He was satisfied that American principles
could and would accompany the flag, and he did not believe
they would be extended any other way. The British Empire has
in our day been transformed into a commonwealth under far more
autocratic auspices than those conceived by Douglas. Mexicans
and Orientals in our Far West and Southwest have suffered a
good deal of second- and third-class citizenship, giving a good
indication of what might have happened on a much larger scale.
But have these Mexicans been governed worse than their kinsmen
across the border? And where, in the Orient, are Orientals more
fortunate? Within the framework of our constitutional system the
leaven of free principles has operated steadily in favor of equal
treatment of the groups suffering most unequal treatment. Are
people better abandoned to systems which deny them even the
hope or promise of equality?

In the great Chicago speech 28 in defense of the Compromise
of 1850, from which we have quoted above, Douglas spoke, in
the vein of John Stuart Mill, of the necessity of barbarians being
governed by civilized men. In the same context he observed,
"The history of the world furnished few examples where any
considerable portion of the human race have shown themselves
sufficiently enlightened and civilized to exercise the rights and
enjoy the blessings of freedom. In Asia and Africa we find nothing
but ignorance, superstition, and despotism. Large portions of
Europe and America can scarcely lay claim to civilization and
Christianity; and a still smaller portion have demonstrated their
capacity for self-government/' For Douglas, to strengthen boldly

102 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

the political and material foundations of the one indubitably
successful modern republic could not be an anti-republican
policy, simply because all of those comprehended within the re-
publican boundaries would not themselves immediately become
full members of the republican polity. The counsels of perfection
are not for the kingdom of this world. Lincoln, as we shall pres-
ently see, approved of the policy of the Founding Fathers which
gave full legal sanction to slavery, where it already existed, as
a "necessity" without which this republic could not have been
founded. Cannot any evil, without which a greater good seems
unattainable, be similarly regarded as a "necessity?"

Douglas was convinced that he lived in an age of progress,
yet he did not regard progress as something to be taken for
granted. The optimism of the age of Tom Paine and Tom Jeffer-
son had received some rude shocks in the catastrophe of the
French Revolution, the subsequent dominance of continental
reaction, and the squalid misgovernment exhibited by the re-
cently emancipated Latin Americans. Something might be done
for world freedom, but it must be done by expanding American
freedom. We should not forget that Douglas was the very proto-
type of the American politician of the melting pot. As the most
popular leader of America's largest and most downtrodden im-
migrant group before the Civil War, he demonstrated, no less
than Lincoln, how and why the New World could offer hope
to the people of the Old. But that hope would be stultified if
the United States was not the undisputed mistress of the New
World.

As Douglas viewed the political scene at mid-century, he too
saw the anti-slavery movement and the nativist movement as
obverse and reverse of the same coin. The anti-slavery movement,
with its talk of the "higher law," was distinctly aimed at destroying
the Constitution, was distinctly aimed at a coup d6tat in which,
when abolitionists held the power of the federal government, the
powers of the states would be stripped from them. As we have
amply shown, Douglas was the enemy of extremists North and
South, yet his enmity was greater for abolitionists, not simply be-
cause it was more convenient to attack enemies outside the ranks
of his party, but because he felt they were the aggressors. Seces-
sion and abolition were equally unconstitutional, but seces-
sion would be morally justified as the exercise of a revolutionary
right as Lincoln was to concede in his First Inaugural Address

MANIFEST DESTINY 103

if it were the only means to security. And if the abolitionists had
their way they could eventually, through control of the federal
machinery, jeopardize the security of Southerners far more than
King George III had ever done. But the anti-slavery movement
was also the profoundest obstacle to expansion. Yet it was only
through expansion that Douglas saw the United States continuing
to assimilate the bruised and crushed sufferers from European
despotism. The opponents of expansion were the same who
would make Britain a "partner" with this country in the New
World, who would thus "contain" and ultimately strangle us in
the toils and tangles of Old World diplomacy. And these same
opponents to expansion, these same devotees of England, were
the ones who wished to preserve the Anglo-Saxon purity of
American society, who wished to exclude foreigners from politi-
cal rights and to keep the benefits of our free institutions to them-
selves. In short, the movements against slavery, against expansion,
against foreigners were all movements for British interests and
for those Americans who conceived their own interests in kinship
to England's. The high moral tone which permeated all three
was nothing but snobbishness. The crocodile tears that were shed
for the Negro were only pretexts for destroying the constitutional
equality of the states, that equality which alone guaranteed that
a large republic could remain a free republic; and which, hence,
alone permitted the extension of our boundaries as far as the
fulfillment of our republican mission to the world might require.

Chapter V
The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise I

THE LEGAL POWER AND PRACTICAL IMPOTENCE

OF FEDERAL PROHIBITIONS OF SLAVERY IN THE

TERRITORIES

IN 1860 the Illinois State Central Committee of the Republican
party asserted that Douglas had been anti-slavery until January
4, 1854. On the twenty-third day of that month, to repeat their
accusation, "the turning point in Mr. Douglas's political highway"
was reached. "From this sharp corner," they say, "his course is
wholly and utterly pro-slavery." That Douglas's shift in tactics did
not mean a change in his ultimate aims or views with respect to
slavery, we have already proposed. We have seen that some such
alteration was the natural response of a wise statesman attempt-
ing to retain control of events amid the dramatic and rapidly
shifting scenes of the fifties. Yet this defense of Douglas is clearly
insufficient for at least one simple reason: the country was enjoy-
ing a respite from the slavery controversy after the Compromise
of 1850 had been confirmed by the election of 1852; and the
dramatic scenes of the later fifties, to which we have said Douglas
adapted himself, were all directly attributable to his own action
in repealing the Missouri Compromise. The bloody struggle
in Kansas, die attempted Lecompton fraud, the Dred Scott de-
cision, John Brown, all are virtually inconceivable except as
consequences of the Kansas-Nebraska Act We cannot then credit
a man with statesmanship for trying to ride the whirlwind which
he himself has sown.
Of the great political facts which we have said dominated

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE I 105

Douglas's judgment in the later fifties, paramount was the
Republican party, an anti-slavery party capable of representing a
constitutional majority without drawing a single vote from a slave
state. Yet Douglas had a primary responsibility for its existence,
since the Republican party was originally simply the anti-
Nebraska party. Moreover, we must see that the question of the
morality of Lincoln's opposition to Douglas in 1858 is identical
in principle with the question of the morality of Douglas's action
in 1854. This is true, first of all, because either action was an
absolute sine qua non of the advent of the Civil War. We have
spelled out Lincoln's responsibility in Chapter I, but of course the
opportunity Lincoln seized would not have existed had not
Douglas espoused the repeal of the Missouri slavery restriction.
Lincoln's action, which in 1858 denied to Douglas any continuing
partnership in the free-soil coalition, forced the slavery contro-
versy back to the pristine issue which had engendered Republi-
canism in 1854. After the house divided speech, and because of
it, the central demand of the Republican party, the centripetal
force in the free-soil coalition, again became the restoration of the
Missouri Compromise. Thus the debate of 1858 turned more upon
the question of the justice and expediency of what had happened
in 1854 than u P on ^7 ther practical question. Only the most
complete understanding of the nature of the repealing action
will enable us to judge well of the issues between the two men.
We have observed in a previous chapter that, in our judgment,
Douglas never desired and never intended to repeal the Missouri
Compromise. But we have also maintained that in 1854 Douglas
came to the conviction that only the full and consistent applica-
tion of the doctrine of popular sovereignty the true principle of
republican institutions as he understood them could resolve the
territorial question and provide a firm basis for future national de-
velopment. These assertions are paradoxical in two respects: First,
because Douglas, after the repeal, always insisted that he had
always intended it. Second, because there is a manifest incongru-
ity between the proposition that Douglas did not intend the repeal
and that he did intend full recognition of popular sovereignty.
It must be our task, in this and the succeeding chapters of Part II,
to reconcile these assertions. Only by seeing to what extent they
can be reconciled can we see how Douglas himself must have
viewed the repeal, and only in this light can we see the case for
Douglas in its full dimensions.

106 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

To comprehend how such a reconciliation is possible, we must
grasp in detail the progress and consistency of Douglas's views
on the question of federal power and duty in the territories, from
his amendment to the Texas annexation resolutions in 1845 until
his report and revised Nebraska bill of January 4, 1854. In the
present chapter we shall analyze Douglas's proposals in dealing
with territorial questions for the period 1845-50 and his various
subsequent explanations of them. This we shall do with the
accusations made against Douglas by the Republicans in the 1860
campaign, as a foil. Despite the notorious perversity of campaign
charges, these accusations constitute a principal source of the un-
derstanding of Douglas's motives which has characterized a great
body of historical literature. We know no better way to transcend
the polemics upon this subject than by a critical confrontation of
them at their point of origin. We will then attempt to show how
Douglas himself must have viewed his policies, in the periods in
question, in their tendency to promote or hinder slavery, to
promote or hinder that genuine local control of domestic institu-
tions he called popular sovereignty, to promote or hinder sectional
peace.

In Chapter VI we take up the charge of "manifest falsification"
hurled first by the Independent Democrats and then by the
entire free-soil movement against Douglas's assertion, in his first
"quasi* repeal amendment, that the Missouri Compromise restric-
tion of slavery had been "superseded" by the Compromise of 1850.
It is our contention that when Douglas made the explicit "super-
session* assertion he had already been driven from the ground
he intended, on January 4, 1854, to occupy. Yet the conception
of the "supersession" of the Missouri Compromise is the central
conception of the strategy which constituted Douglas's intention
when he first introduced his revised Nebraska bill The logic of
the "supersession" thesis would not, we believe, be intelligible
except in the light of his previous record upon the territorial ques-
tion. We shall demonstrate how, in this light, it is intelligible, and
how it partakes of a meaning radically different from that imputed
to it by Douglas's detractors.

In Chapter VII we shall first propound the reasons why, in
January 1854, Douglas must have felt obliged to abandon the
Nebraska bill of 1853, which he had ardently supported and in
which no suggestion of repealing the Missouri law occurs. Thence
we proceed to an analysis of the great report accompanying

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE I 107

Douglas's revised Nebraska bill. In this report, and in it alone, is
to be found the key to Douglas's original intentions in bringing
in this revised bill. The many books and articles on this question,
from the work of Mrs. Dixon (wife of the Kentucky senator who
first moved the repeal on the Senate floor, after Douglas's bill
had been reported) to that of P. O. Ray and Frank Hodder (to
mention only some leading names), are all beside the point
in the decisive respect. Although they all contribute collateral in-
sights by pointing to good reasons why Douglas might have
accepted the idea of repeal (to get a central or northern railroad
route, to help Senator Atchison in his fight with Benton, to gain
southern support for the next presidential nomination, etc.), they
are needlessly conjectural in saying why he did accept it. This,
we believe, can be adjudged only in the light of Douglas's
intentions before the repeal; and the only authentic contemporary
record of those intentions is Douglas's report and bill of January
4, 1854. Nowhere, to our knowledge, in the literature on this tre-
mendous historical crux, is there a thorough analysis of the report.
We have here attempted to supply it, and by it to show how
and why (in our judgment) Douglas believed that he could
establish popular sovereignty as the ruling principle for territorial
government without repealing the Missouri Compromise.

Finally, in Chapter VIII, we record the tragic denouement of
the strategy intended by Douglas but never carried out. From
this record we may elucidate a judgment of responsibility for the
catastrophe which will do justice to Douglas's intentions, even
though it may deplore the action he was driven to endorse. And
if we find it impossible to believe what he subsequently said about
his own intentions, we must evaluate his disingenuousness in the
light of the public good he meant to achieve by it, and in com-
parison with the alternatives he felt compelled to reject. For if,
because of reasons he could not have foreseen, the repeal, as the
lesser of evils, appeared necessary, it was surely right for him to
represent it in the only light in which he thought he could defend
it.

The "sharp corner" visualized by the Illinois Republican Com-
mittee in 1860 is made to appear much more acute by the manner
in which they interpret Douglas's pronouncements prior to

1O8 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

January 23, 1854. The plausibility of imputing to Douglas some
anti-slavery bias in the earlier period we also have maintained,
and evidence for it has been already presented. Yet the impres-
sion intended to be conveyed by the Republicans, that he was
anti-slavery in the same sense that they were, and that he was
an apostate from their principles, is certainly wrong. The extent
to which they succeed in producing this impression in their
pamphlet is by employing the technique of highly selective
quotation. For they would have us believe that Douglas had
been, even as they were, a passionate believer in the inviolable
sanctity of the Missouri Compromise; that he had believed, no
less than they, in the constitutional power of Congress to prohibit
slavery in the national territories; and that he had professed to
believe, no less than Seward or Lincoln, in a policy which looked
toward the ultimate replacement of slavery by free institutions
in all the states of the Union,

It is curious that each of these propositions, stated in terms
of sufficient generality, is true. Douglas had subscribed to them.
But he had never done so in the same sense as the Republicans.
It was only by exploiting equivocations that they made out their
case against him as an anti-slavery turncoat To take the leading
example, when Douglas spoke of the Missouri Compromise, he
did not mean by it the same thing the Republicans meant. To
Lincoln the Missouri Compromise meant a system of equivalents
as did the Compromise of 1850. It meant all the parts of the
bargain taken together and in their relation to each other. To
Douglas it meant the principle of an equitable division of national
territory along a geographical line, as represented by the parallel
of latitude at 36'3o". In other words, Douglas understood the
Missouri Compromise to be the Missouri Compromise line. In
many of his speeches "the line" and "the compromise" are inter-
changeable terms. This usage, we add, was not uncommon.
Indeed, one of the captions in the Republican tract is: "He
thought the Missouri Compromise should have been extended to
the Pacific." Whether such usage involved a misunderstanding re-
mains to be seen. In any case, we will show why a strong case
can be made for its political legitimacy and why Douglas's
espousal of the Missouri Compromise as he understood it, before
1850, is not inconsistent with his abandonment of it in 1854.

Before doing so, let us dispose of the charge that Douglas had,
in the absurd exaggeration of the Republican pamphlet of 1860,

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE I

actually advocate4 Seward's doctrine of an "irrepressible conflict"
This charge rested mainly on the passage in the speech directed
against Calhoun in 1850, in which Douglas had spoken of an "age
of progress" and correlated progress with the gradual abolition of
slavery. Yet in this speech Douglas said nothing of conflict, irre-
pressible or otherwise; he merely contemplated the same peaceful
progress of emancipation that had led six of the original thirteen
states to emancipate their slaves in the half century that followed
independence. Moreover, since the agency of emancipation was
local opinion, operating through the machinery of state govern-
ment, it was an example to him of the true method by which
freedom extinguished slavery in an "age of progress," without any
reference to the federal government of the republic whatever.
Further: when men like Lincoln and Seward spoke of the
opposition of freedom and slavery, they thought, as Lincoln said
at Peoria, of an "eternal antagonism," of a "collision" so fierce that
"shocks, and throes, and convulsions must ceaselessly follow." But
Douglas never conceded any such antagonism. Progress was the
result of enlightened self-interest: there was no more "eternal
antagonism" between freedom and slavery, in his view, than be-
tween the horse and the steam engine. As the advantages of the
one came to be understood it naturally replaced the other. This,
we believe, is another aspect of the "dollars-and-cents" argument
to which we have sufficiently adverted above. But further:
Douglas's expectation that slavery would be replaced by freedom
was not, in and of itself, a policy. Like the opening of Lincoln's
house divided speech, Douglas in 1850 was expressing what he
believed would happen rather than what ought to happen.

When Lincoln in 1858 expressed the conviction that the Union
must become all slave or all free, Douglas accused him of advo-
cating a war between the sections. And Lincoln's persistent retort
was that he did not, by these words, advocate anything at all;
he only said what he believed would happen. The two men
differed in their estimates of the direction events were taking, but
the difference in their "predictions" was of course symptomatic of
the difference in their policies. From an anti-slavery viewpoint,
Douglas was an optimist and Lincoln a pessimist. It was in large
measure because Douglas did not believe in the possible victory
of slavery over freedom in the nation at large that he chose a
policy which would put out of sight, as far as possible^ the harsh
moral contrast Lincoln, on the contrary, saw nothing irreversible

HO THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

in "progress," no guarantee that the principles of republican
government might not perish. He would never, therefore, acqui-
esce in a policy that promised sectional peace, on the assumption
that a decision by default with regard to slavery must inevitably
be a decision against slavery. This Republican charge only con-
ceals the gulf which always existed between Lincoln and Douglas.

Let us now clarify Douglas's general stand with regard to the
power of Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories. The Dred
Scott decision, of course, forced Douglas to perform remarkable
but not invariably successful mental gymnastics in order to
harmonize that monstrosity with his previous pronouncements.
But before the debacle of this decision which was a personal ca-
tastropheDouglas was remarkably consistent in his views. And
this consistency is easily appreciated if a simple distinction is kept
in mind. It is that, while Douglas always granted the legal power
of the federal government to prohibit slavery in a territory, he
also always insisted upon the superior moral right of such action
being reserved to the inhabitants of a territory when organized
into a political community. Douglas's position on the exercise of
federal power over slavery in the territories paralleled Lincoln's
position on the legitimacy of slavery in the states. Lincoln be-
lieved slavery to be against natural right, to be intrinsically un-
just. Yet he conceded there were circumstances in which it might
be the lesser evil. Since it is wise to choose the lesser of two
evils when no other alternative is possible, the decision in favor
of slavery, in a concrete case, might be morally right, even though
slavery itself is morally wrong. In essence, although without
the same casuistical clarity, this was Douglas's conception of the
relation of popular sovereignty to such exercises of federal author-
ity as the Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise.
Popular sovereignty was the true principle upon which our repub-
lican institutions rested; but in certain actual situations federal
legislation better served to pacify sectional antagonisms, to pre-
serve the Union. Douglas was inclined to be indifferent about
accepting the federal restriction of slavery in these cases and in
the cases where he proposed the extension of the Missouri Com-
promise line because he was morally certain that the results of
such federal law would only mean the placing of a seal of approval
upon the results of popular sovereignty. Douglas was no doctri-
naire; he would never insist on what he believed was a purely

REPEAL OF THE MISSOUBI COMPROMISE I m

abstract principle, without regard for consequences. What Doug-
las was prepared to do if the right of a people to exclude slavery
from a territory was seriously interfered with was demonstrated
to the world in the battle against Lecompton. To sum up: Douglas
never believed that Congress, as distinct from the people of a
territory, should decide for or against slavery. But as long as a
congressional enactment served to produce general acquiescence
in a settlement throughout the nation, and as long as such a
settlement was not a substantive denial of popular sovereignty,
Douglas was willing to "prefer" such a mode of dealing with slav-
ery in the territories. The legal power of Congress he always
concededbefore Dred Scott but the expediency of its exercise
depended upon contingent factors. Among those factors, the chief
one was the state of public opinion, North and South, that had
made such an enactment as the Missouri Compromise a cause of
harmony and not of mutual grievance. Whenever such restriction
of slavery became a bone of contention, there was no moral claim
which would cause Douglas to cling to it The Missouri Compro-
mise never had any other merit in Douglas's eyes than its utility
as a cause of intersectional harmony.

We shall now take up some points in the documentation of the
charge that Douglas had been false to his own principles when
he renounced federal restriction of slavery in Nebraska and
consented to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The first
Republican allegation was that in 1845, as a member of the House,
he had introduced the amendment to the joint resolution for the
annexation of Texas which provided "and in such States as may
be formed out of said territory north of the Missouri Compromise
line, slavery or involuntary servitude except for crime shall be
prohibited." "Let it be observed," crowed the Republicans, "that
while Thomas Jefferson and the fathers of the Republic pro-
posed to prohibit slavery in the Territories only, and while the
Republican party of today propose no more and no less, Stephen
A. Douglas sought, in 1845, to prohibit it in States, even though
the people wanted it!"

The foregoing amendment had been offered on January 25, and
on February 23 Douglas spoke in the House on the question of
the admission of Iowa and Florida, at which time he made the
following remarks, which the Republicans quoted against him:

112 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

The father may bind his son during his minority, but the
moment he attains his majority his fetters are severed, and
he is free to regulate his own conduct. SO WITH THE
TERRITORIES; THEY ARE SUBJECT TO THE JURIS-
DICTION AND CONTROL OF CONGRESS DURING
THEIR INFANCY-THEIR MINORITY; but when they at-
tain their majority AND OBTAIN ADMISSION INTO THE
UNION, they are free from all restraints and restrictions,
except such as the Constitution of the United States has
imposed upon each and all of the States. [Capitals supplied
by the Republican Committee.]

It is, we think, reasonable to interpret the constitutional thinking
of Douglas's amendment in the light of this speech, made less
than a month afterward. The Republicans think this passage
exhibits Douglas as an exponent of the constitutional power of
Congress to place any restriction it might have seen fit to place
upon the territories. But the passage also cuts another way: it
denies the power of Congress to place any restrictions that are
binding beyond the territorial period. It says, in effect, that the
amendment to the annexation resolutions could not bind states
formed from Texas north of the Missouri Compromise line to for-
bid slavery after they had been admitted to the Union as states.
We must recall that, although the Missouri Compromise "forever
prohibited" slavery in the remaining Louisiana territory north of
the line, this was generally understood to apply only to the terri-
torial period. Legal opinion in 1820 was divided, but we are told
in John Quincy Adams's diary that President Monroe and all his
Cabinet, Adams himself alone excepted, so believed. 1 By 1845
opinion was overwhelming in favor of the doctrine advanced by
Douglas, and in 1858 Lincoln himself did not dispute it. In the
joint debates he conceded that if Congress kept slavery out of a
territory before it became a state, and the people thereafter
adopted slavery, there was no power under the Constitution to
say them nay. From this, as will presently appear, Douglas's
amendment to the Texas annexation resolution had exactly the
same force and effect as the Missouri Compromise.

The Republicans also overlooked a distinction between the
Missouri legislation and the annexation resolution. The enabling
act for the admission of Missouri was, while the latter was not,
a statute in the ordinary sense. It was originally sought to annex

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE I

Texas by treaty, but the partisans of the measure ware unable to
secure the support of two thirds of the Senate, whereas they did
command majorities in both houses. Whatever the constitutional
merits (or demerits) of the method employed to secure Texas,
what was admitted to the Union via the joint resolution was not
a "territory," in the sense of a community inferior in legal political
capacity to a state. Texas, prior to admission, was a republic, as
free and independent of the United States as the United States
was of Great Britain. The word "territory" in the amendment to
the joint resolution refers to the extent of land lying north of the
compromise line, not to the political condition of that land. Doug-
las in 1854 explained his amendment correctly when he said that
Congress did not have the power to bind the action of "States"
formed out of Texas and applying for admission, but that the
joint resolutions formed a compact with the Republic of Texas
which, as an independent power, could commit her citizens, while
subjects of Texas, to the fulfillment of such obligations. This power
of Texas over "applying" states, however, also ended the moment
they became actual states, equal in all constitutional respects to
their "parent." When the Republic of Texas joined the Union, all
of it became the State of Texas. Thus all "States" formed out of
Texas and applying for admission to the Union would remain un-
der the jurisdiction of the State of Texas until the moment of
admission. We leave aside the question of the true boundaries of
Texas, later decided by compromise. Much territory claimed by
Texas was later joined to New Mexico Territory, and some to
other territories to the north. But whatever Texas's true bounda-
ries, it was provided in the terms of annexation that this same
state might in future be subdivided into four additional states with
the consent of Texas and Congress. It will be observed that the
word "territory" in Douglas's amendment was not capitalized;
while the word "States," following the usual but not invariable
custom of that day, was capitalized. When the Republicans, in
their scathing comment, refer to "Territories" in the sense that
includes political capacity and not mere extent of land, they too
capitalize. In short, because all of Texas was transformed by an-
nexation from an independent republic to a state in the Union, the
law did not contemplate "Territories" there, or to be formed there,
to which the slavery prohibition could extend. Douglas's language
is strictly correct and means that, when applying for admission
as states, such "States" as are formed north of 36'so" shall apply

114 iraS CASE FOR DOUGLAS

with constitutions prohibiting slavery. It does not, however, pro-
hibit these prospective states, any more than the Ordinance of
1787 prohibited Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, or Michigan
or the Missouri Compromise prohibited Iowa after 1846 from
adopting slavery as a domestic institution at any time after ad-
mission to statehood. However unthinkable such a development
may in fact have been, the legal situation was generally thus un-
derstood at the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

This view of the Constitution is vehemently set forth in another
portion of that same speech of February 13, 1845. It is omitted
in the Republican tract but immediately precedes, in the original,
the passage already given.

It was clear in his mind [said Douglas] that whenever a new
State was admitted into the Union, it came in on an equal
footing, in all respects, with the original States; and all at-
tempts to deprive her of that equality, by act of Congress,
was in derogation of the Constitution of the United States,
and consequently void . . . Many of the northern States have,
at different periods, asserted and exercised the right of es-
tablishing and abolishing slavery, each for itself, without
reference to the wishes of Congress, or of any other States.
If the old States had this power, he could not discover how
it could be denied to the new ones ... A man might as well
attempt to impose restraints upon the free action of his son
after his arrival at full and lawful age, as Congress to fetter
the action of the Territories after their admission into the
Union as States. 2

It will be seen that the burden of the two passages, taken together,
is not so much that Congress has legal power to bind during the
territorial period although this is, incidentally, affirmed but that
it does not have such power when once that period has passed.

In the same speech Douglas already indicates, albeit indirectly,
the opinion that his own state had never been affected by the
Northwest Ordinance. "Illinois," he says here, "by the free will of
her own people, came into the Union without slavery, and with
a constitution declaring that slavery shall never exist." This as-
sertion in 1845 is paralleled by another of 1850, which is among
those quoted in the Republican tract to show his earlier anti-
slavery feelings:

REPEAL OF THE MISSOUBI COMPROMISE I 115

I undertake to say that there is not one of these States that
would have tolerated the institution of slavery in its limits,
even if it had been peremptorily required to do so by act of
Congress. It is a libel on the character of these people to
say that the HONEST SENTIMENTS OF THEIR HEARTS
were smothered, and their political action upon this question
constrained and directed by act of Congress. Will the Sena-
tors from Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa make
any such DEGRADING ADMISSION in respect to their
constituencies? I WILL NEVER BLACKEN THE CHAR-
ACTER OF MY OWN STATE BY SUCH AN ADMIS-
SION . . . [Capitals supplied by the Republican Commit-
tee.]

Let us note that what is common to these two passages is the
inefficacy of federal legislation concerning slavery in the ter-
ritories. The Republican Committee comments on the 1850 selec-
tion thus: "Let the reader contrast this fine assertion of the
conscientious convictions of the people of Illinois with the horri-
ble libel upon them contained in his speech of February zgth,
1860 . . . and see how he has kept his promise 'never to blacken
the character* of his own State by such an admission." Here are
the remarks of 1860 which, incidentally, are practically identical
with passages in the joint debates of 1858:

We in Illinois tried slavery while we were a Territory, and
found it was not profitable; and hence we turned philan-
thropists and abolished it

And again:

But they (the people of Illinois) said "experience proves that
it is not going to be profitable in this climate." . . . They
had no scruples about its being right, but they said, "we can-
not make any money by it ... perhaps we shall gain popu-
lation faster if we stop slavery and invite in the northern
population"; and as a matter of political policy, State policy,
they prohibited Slavery themselves.

Now an unbiased reading of the 1850 and 1860 statements will
show that there is no contradiction between them. The pledge
"never to blacken the character" of his constituents refers to the
absence of constraint or direction by Congress of their action in

Il6 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

excluding slavery, and has no reference whatever to their motive
in so doing. The intended impression, that Douglas had once im-
puted a moral repudiation of slavery to Illinois, which he later
denied, is destroyed the moment one reads further in the 1850
speech. Douglas never believed that qualms as to the morality
of slavery had ever had any influence in determining political
action with respect to it certainly not in the old Northwest.
Slavery, he maintained, did not prove highly profitable north of
the Ohio River. If the economic development of the area could
not be carried on in the manner traditional in the South from
which most of the Northwest was originally settled then free
labor must be invited in. Since free labor and slave labor did
not mix this is Douglas's tacit rather than explicit premise, but
it was universally understood then slavery on the soil of the
Northwest must be ended. What is impressive, above all, is Doug-
las's steady insistence that popular sovereignty was not only the
right principle but the only practical one. This must be kept in
mind when noting his attempts to extend the Missouri Com-
promise line. In his mind, the extension of the line to new
territories, or its retraction from the old, was never more than
a token concession to fallacious albeit politically important-
opinions.

We now present evidence substantiating the foregoing inter-
pretation, drawn from the same 1850 speech. The major con-
tention of this 1850 speech is its denial of Calhoun's thesis;
viz., that the rights of the South had been persistently violated
by the North and that the South was entitled to guarantees of
equal rights in the common territories of the nation. The core
of Douglas's denial is that the Constitution the bond of Union-
recognizes and represents in the federal legislature the states and
the people, but not sections. The following passage is, incidentally,
among those used in the Republican campaign tract.

The territories belong to the United States as one people,
one nation, and are to be disposed of for the common benefit
of all, according to the principles of the Constitution. Each
State, as a member of the Confederacy, has a right to a voice
in forming the rules and regulations for the government of
the Territories; but the different sections North, South, East,
and West have no such right. It is no violation of southern
rights to prohibit slavery [at this point the Republicans leave

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE I 117

off quoting in their pamphlet!], nor of northern rights to
leave the people to decide the question for themselves. In
this sense no geographical section of the Union is entitled
to any share of the territories. 8

Precisely why there could be no violation of southern rights, by
either the Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise, or the
provision excluding slavery from the Oregon Territory, is now
set forth. The following is not reproduced in the Republican cam-
paign tract.

But I must proceed to the consideration of the particular
acts of aggression of which the Senator complains. And first
of the Ordinance of 1787 . . . This ordinance, the Senator
from South Carolina informs us, had the effect "to exclude
the South entirely from that vast and fertile region which
lies between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, now embracing
five States and one territory." Is not the Senator mistaken in
his facts? ... at the time the constitution of the State of
Ohio was formed, at least one half of the people of that
State, and probably more, were natives of, were immigrants
from southern States: that fully two-thirds of the people of
Indiana, at the time she adopted her constitution, were na-
tives of the South; and that a much larger proportion of the
people of Illinois, at the time she was admitted into the
Union, were also from the South. These facts do not indicate
that the Ordinance had the effect to exclude the South en-
tirely from those territories. Let us next inquire what effect
it had upon slavery there. The ordinance . . . was adopted
. . . when the whole country was a vast unpeopled wilder-
ness . . . The object of the ordinance was to prohibit, not
to abolish, slavery in the Northwest territory. And as an
evidence that the ordinance has produced the effect intended
by its framers, we have been repeatedly referred to those
five free States carved out of that territory.

Here we interject the comment that the insistence that the
ordinance had produced its intended effect-potf hoc, propter hoc
was a central contention of Lincoln throughout the debates.
Lincoln agreed with Douglas that the South had not been de-
barred from the old Northwest. Had not the Lincolns migrated
from the slave soil of Kentucky? But he emphatically insisted

Il8 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

that the prohibition of slavery was a necessary cause of the
difference between the states south of the Ohio River, in which
slavery existed, and the states north of it, not one of which per-
mitted slavery. Lincoln's argument, one must observe, conceded
the grounds upon which the southern sense of grievance fed
the grounds of Calhoun's argument. For Lincoln not only con-
ceded, but insisted, that slaveholding had been debarred by
federal enactment. This was gall and wormwood to the South.
What we should never lose sight of, in reading what follows, is
that Douglas employed the identical argument to attack Calhoun
in 1850 and to attack Lincoln in 1858 and 1860. The ambidex-
terity of the argument, as well as its historical merits, must be
taken into account in its evaluation.

True, these five States are now free, with provisions in the
constitutions of each prohibiting slavery in all time to come;
but was it the ordinance that made them free States? The
census returns show that there were three hundred and thirty-
one slaves in Illinois in 1840, and more than seven hundred
in 1830. 1 do not recollect precisely how many there were in
the other States; but I remember there was quite a number
in Indiana. How came these slaves in Illinois? They were
taken there under the ordinance and in defiance of it. Illinois
was a slave territory. The people were mostly emigrants from
the slaveholding States, and attached to the institution by
association, habit, and interest. Supposing that the soil,
climate, and productions of the country were adapted to
slave labor, they naturally desired to introduce the institution
to which they had been accustomed during their whole lives.
Accordingly, the territorial legislature passed laws, the object
and effect of which was to introduce slavery under what
was called a system of indentures. These laws authorized
the owners of slaves to bring them into the territory, and
there enter into contracts with them, by which the slaves
were to serve the master during the time specified in the
contracts or "indentures," which were usually for a period
reaching beyond the life of the slaves; and in the event the
slaves should refuse to enter into the indenture [a most un-
likely contingency!], after being brought into the territory,
the master was allowed thirty days to take them back again,
so as not to lose the right of property in them. Under the

REPEAL OF THE MISSOUBI COMPROMISE I HQ

operation of these laws, Illinois became a slaveholding terri-
tory under the ordinance, and in utter defiance of its plain
and palpable provision. The convention which assembled at
Kaskaskia, in 1818, to form the constitution of die State of
Illinois, was composed, to a considerable extent, of slave-
holders, representing a slaveholding constituency. This body
of men had become satisfied, from experience, that the cli-
mate and productions of the country were unfavorable to
slave labor, and that the institution was prejudicial to their
interests and welfare. Accordingly, we find three important
principles established in the constitution which they framed,
and with which Illinois was admitted into the Union:

ist. The right of property in all slaves, or indentured per-
sons then in the State, was confirmed:

2nd. That no slaves should thereafter be brought into the
State;

3rd. Provision for a gradual system of emancipation, by
which the State should eventually become entirely free.

. . . These facts furnish a practical illustration of that great
truth, which ought to be familiar to all statesmen and politi-
cians, that a law passed by the national legislature to operate
locally upon a people not represented, will always remain
practically a dead letter upon the statute book, if it be in
opposition to the wishes and supposed interests of those who
are to be affected by it, and at die same time charged with
its execution ... In free countries, laws and ordinances are
mere nullities, unless sustained by the hearts and intellects
of the people for whom they are made, and by whom they
are to be executed.

This last passage places a finger upon one of the most vital of
the nerves of the controversy between Lincoln and Douglas. In a
passage in the first joint debate, to which we shall return, Lincoln
was to say, "In this and like communities, public sentiment is
everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it,
nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public senti-
ment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces
decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible
to be executed." Thus Lincoln, no less than Douglas, believed

120 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

that the execution of laws, ordinances, and decisions, in a free
society, depended upon "the hearts and intellects of the people
for whom they are made." Now how were the Ordinance of 1787
and the Missouri Compromise restrictions upon slavery to be
enforced? The statutes in question contained nothing but simple
declarations that slavery "shall be prohibited." Concerning how
or by whom the prohibitions were to be enforced, nothing what-
ever was said. Tlie only compulsion resulting from such enact-
ments would occur if a federal court refused to uphold a territorial
slaveholder's claim should it come to be adjudicated.

What good such "enforcement" might be to Negroes held as
slaves on "free" soil assuming the federal courts were to regard
the congressional prohibition as valid is indicated by a passage
in Lincoln's Peoria speech:

But it is said, there is now [October 1854] no * aw ^ Nebraska
on the subject of slavery; and that, in such case, taking a
slave there, operates his freedom. That is good book-law;
but is not the rule of actual practice. Wherever slavery is,
it has been first introduced without law. The oldest laws we
find concerning it, are not laws introducing it; but regulating
it, as an already existing thing. A white man takes his slave
to Nebraska now; who will inform the negro that he is free?
Who will take him before court to test the question of his
freedom? In ignorance of his legal emancipation, he is kept
chopping, splitting and plowing. Others are brought, and
move on in the same track. At last, if ever the time for voting
comes, on the question of slavery, the institution already in
fact exists in the country, and cannot well be removed. The
facts of its presence, and the difficulty of its removal, will
carry the vote in its favor. Keep it out until a vote is taken,
and a vote in favor of it, can not be got in any population
of forty thousand, on earth, who have been drawn together
by the ordinary motives of emigration and settlement. To
get slaves into the country simultaneously with the whites,
in the incipient states of settlement, is the precise stake
played for, and won in this Nebraska measure. 4

But how much did the Missouri Compromise and the Northwest
Ordinance differ from the "book-law" that no law is free law?
Lincoln asserted that it made a great difference: ". . . the posi-
tive congressional enactment is known to, and respected by all,

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE I 121

or nearly all; whereas the negative principle that no law is free
law, is not much known except among lawyers." As a practical
illustration of the difference, Lincoln pointed to the difference
between Illinois and "the adjoining Missouri country, where there
was no Ordinance of '87 ... [and] they [i.e., slaves] were
carried ten times, nay a hundred times, as fast, and actually made
a slave State." Douglas's historical brief is a powerful denial that
"respect" for a positive congressional enactment, an enactment
unsupported by any enforcement legislation, could have made
any such difference as Lincoln implied it had.

May not a strong prima-facie case in favor of Douglas be found
in that the history of the American frontier shows little respect
or regard for laws which the settlers did not believe to be in
their immediate interest? Moreover, the moral sense of Americans
has always been, as Douglas indicates, strongly prejudicial to the
enactments of a legislature in which they were not directly
represented. Lincoln's argument rests heavily on the physical
contiguity of Missouri and Illinois. Yet Lincoln does not consider
whether, despite this and apart from federal law, there might
not have been sufficient economic differences in the situations of
the two states to tip the balance for and against slavery in oppo-
site directions. Missouri was not only farther west than Illinois
but in closer contact with the Deep South. Illinois, touching only
the border state of Kentucky, was much closer to the Northeast
via the Great Lakes. The navigation of the Mississippi, always
highly important to both states, nevertheless was relatively more
important to Missouri. It was symptomatic of the economic futures
of both states, futures which must have been visible relatively
early, that their two greatest cities should have faced in different
directions. St. Louis had its strongest links with New Orleans,
Chicago with the great Atlantic ports. The economic heart of
Illinois was the grain- and hog-producing prairies, which were
deemed highly unsuited to slave labor. But the richest grain lands
extended across only the northern tier of Missouri counties. Mis-
souri, however, had found the use of slave labor profitable in
the cultivation of hemp. In the presence of such considerations, it
seems highly unlikely that "book-law" and federal law differed
as much as Lincoln says they did. Who would have told slaves
carried into Nebraska that their legal rights had been violated?
As Lincoln liked to point out, no one had bothered to tell Dred
Scott that he was a free man during his long residence on free

122 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

soil. Indeed, after 1857 the federal judiciary would not have
enforced such "rights." Lincoln's argument of "respect" for the
Northwest Ordinance is hardly supported by the evidence of the
system of indentures, which was a practical circumvention of the
slavery prohibition. Local law seems to have been the effective
law, as Douglas asserted. Only if Congress had enacted a federal
anti-slave code, to be enforced locally, would the broad declara-
tions have had much practical effect. Yet Lincoln and the
Republicans never even dared to ask for this.

Further illustrations of Douglas's attitude toward federal re-
strictions of slaveryillustrations cited in 1860 as examples of a
"Republican" attitude in 1850 are Douglas's amendment to the
Oregon bill and his espousal of the cause of the constitutionality
of the Mexican law prohibiting slavery in New Mexico. Calhoun
had declared that the provision in the law organizing Oregon
Territory which forbade slavery was another of the "aggressions"
of the North upon the South. To this also Douglas replied by
pointing out that it was not the federal law but the settlers
themselves who had excluded slavery. During the period of joint
occupation with Great Britain, the frontiersmen had formed a
government for themselves which came to be known as the pro-
visional government of Oregon.

By one of the fundamental articles of that government [said
Douglas], slavery was forever prohibited in that territory
. . . That bill [organizing Oregon as an American territory
after the settlement of the northwest boundary with Great
Britain], so far as the question of slavery was concerned,
did nothing more than re-enact and affirm the law which the
people themselves had previously adopted, and rigorously
executed, for the period of twelve years. It was a mere dead
letter, without the slightest effect upon the admission or ex-
clusion of slavery . . . 6

Here we find the federal law conceived as a mere endorsement
of a decision previously rendered by "popular sovereignty." The
only question is why Douglas urged the inclusion of an amend-
ment that had no practical effect if it was so irritating to the
South. The answer to this will appear shortly. First we present
another passage quoted against him in the Republican campaign
tract It was delivered in the Senate on February 12, 1850:

REPEAL. OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE I 123

I am ready ... to show that by the constituted authority
and constitutional authority of Mexico, slavery was prohib-
ited in Mexico at the time of the acquisition, and that pro-
hibition was acquired by us with the soil, and that when
we acquired the territory, we acquired it with that attached
to it that covenant running with the soil and that must
continue, unless removed by competent authority. And be-
cause there was a prohibition thus attached to the soil, I
have always thought it was an unwise, unnecessary, and
unjustifiable course on the part of the people of the free
States, to require Congress to put another prohibition on
the top of that one. It has been the strongest argument
that I have ever urged against the prohibition of slavery in
the Territories, that it was not necessary for the accomplish-
ment of their object. [Italics in the Republican excerpt
only.]

Before offering comment, we continue the passage as it appears
in the Congressional Globe:

It was unwise, it was unnecessary, it was irritating one section
of the Union against another, without doing any good, or
even accomplishing the object in view by the other section.
I have always held that doctrine. I have opposed the Wilmot
Proviso on other grounds; that it was in violation of the great
fundamental principle of self-government; that it was a ques-
tion which the people should be left to decide for themselves.
I have always held, and hold now, that if the people of Cali-
fornia want slavery they have a right to it, and if they do
not, it should not be forced upon them. They have as much
right as the people of Illinois or any other State to settle the
question for themselves. I go further, and I hold that to pro-
hibit slavery in the territories, whilst it is a violation of the
great fundamental principles of self-government, is no viola-
tion of the rights of the southern States. I go further, that
to recognize the institution of slavery in the Territories is
no violation of the rights of the northern States. In that sense,
neither have a right there, in my opinion, to do either. Either
to prohibit or establish slavery, by an act of Congress, over
a people not represented here, is a violation of the rights
of the people of California . . . Why, sir, the principle of
self-government is, that each community shall settle this

124 THE CASE FOR

question for itself; and I hold that the people of California
have the right either to prohibit or establish slavery, and
we have no right to complain, either in the North or the
South, whichever they do. I hold that, till they do establish
it, the prohibition of slavery in the territories which we
acquired by treaty attached to the soil . . . remains in force,
I hold it as a legal proposition. 6

It will be seen that the main burden of the speech is its attack
upon the Wilmot Proviso, and the contention in favor of the
Mexican law abolishing slavery is incidental a fact which con-
siderably mitigates the strength of the anti-slavery sentiment
emphasized by the partial selection. The legal proposition con-
cerning the force of the Mexican anti-slavery law, although
bitterly contested by Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, was widely
accepted. Henry Clay, the chief architect of the 1850 compro-
mise, maintained it vigorously, and Lincoln followed Clay's view,
as he generally did. This was one of the chief arguments besides
Webster's espousal of the "soil and climate" thesis in his March 7
speech which enabled the compromise to be accepted in the
free states. Yet there was an apparently slight but potentially
vast difference between the Clay-Lincoln conception of the force
of Mexican law and Douglas's: according to Douglas, popular
sovereignty permitted the people of New Mexico (or California)
to introduce slavery prior to statehood. That Douglas, accepting
Webster's argument of the unsuitability of slavery in these regions,
considered this a mere hypothetical alternative ought not to be
permitted to obscure it

Douglas in 1850 was then less anti-slavery, or at least anti-
slavery in a different sense, than he is represented to have been
by the Republicans. Yet we must always remember the modifica-
tions in his anti-slavery views in the perspective of his continuing
struggle against the Calhoun-Jefferson Davis wing of the Demo-
cratic party. The anti-slavery Whigs of the North believed that
slavery was not only forbidden throughout the Mexican acquisi-
tion by Mexican law but that it would so remain, even after
the 1850 legislation, until the people of the territories applied
for admission into the Union as states. What Douglas thought
of the precise legal situation created by the New Mexico and
Utah territorial legislation is somewhat obscure, but the practical
situation was clearly thus, as he viewed it: The people of the

REPEAL OF THE MISSOUBI COMPROMISE I 125

territories might introduce slavery whenever they chose and not
only when they organized themselves for statehood. In an "age
of progress," however, this possibility was merely hypothetical.
Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, although denying the validity
of the Mexican anti-slavery law upon American soil, wished
specifically to deny to the territorial legislatures any power to
exclude slavery. Davis clearly believed what Lincoln always
maintained: that, unless the slaveholders went into the territories
toith slaves, the territorial legislature would never vote a slave
code. Davis, in short, understood popular sovereignty, as pro-
pounded by Douglas in 1850, as a guarantee of free soil. Douglas
fought Davis bitterly on this issue in 1850 and at length prevailed,
at least to the extent that the 1850 territorial bills extended to
the territorial legislatures' power over "all rightful subjects of
legislation, consistent with the Constitution of the United States,"
without either the exception or specification of slavery.

However, whether it was consistent with the Constitution for a
territorial legislature to introduce or exclude slaverythe former
proposition being denied by Wilmot Proviso men and the latter
by Calhoun-Davis menwas not decided by Congress. The
question was shunted off by provisions of the law which said
that "all cases involving title to slaves'* and "questions of personal
freedom" might be appealed to the Supreme Court. We shall
in Chapter VII have further occasion to see how the Compromise
of 1850 in fact compromised very little of the outstanding dif-
ferences on the slavery issue; what it really did was to sweep
them under the rug. Or, more accurately, it entrusted them from
1850 on to the Supreme Court. What is surprising is that it took
seven years for that tribunal to pronounce upon any of these
differences. It is probable that Douglas succeeded in his struggle
with Davis only because nothing was really decided against Davis
but rather postponed for the decision of the Court. It is passing
strange how quiet the pro-slavery extremists became when the
fate of their convictions was put into the hands of this Court!
However, the concession made by the free to the slave states
in 1850, that the people of the Utah and New Mexican territories
might choose to have slavery when applying for statehood-
which choice they could in any case make the day after being
admitted did not make the law in New Mexico and Utah ap-
preciably different from what it had been in the old Northwest
or in the lands covered by the Missouri Compromise prohibition.

126 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

Douglas's assertion of the validity of Mexican law meant that
as in the old Northwest pro-slavery men might go into the
territories but would not take slaves with them until they had
decided, after arrival, to establish slavery there. Then they might
establish slavery if they found it desirable to do so. Douglas, as
we have noted, no more expected this to happen than Daniel
Webster did. Yet it might be well to note here that it did happen
in 1859, when the Territory of New Mexico passed a slave code.
It is debatable, however, whether the New Mexico slave code
of 1859 ever was intended or expected to extend slavery. There
never were more than a few slaves there. In the overheated
atmosphere just before the Civil War, it may have signified no
more than an expression of the solidarity of the New Mexicans
with the Deep South. In 1859, as Douglas strove to repair the
damage of his Freeport doctrine, he was frantic in his efforts to
use the New Mexico slave code as an example of how popular
sovereignty had "spread" slavery. But, again, this may have
represented far less of a reversal than it appeared. With secession
imiainent, Douglas was attempting to convince the South that
there was little reality in its imagined grievances.

But why, if Douglas regarded the Wilmot Proviso as an un-
necessary irritant because of the previous prohibition of slavery
attached to the soil by Mexican law, had he moved the amend-
ment prohibiting slavery in Oregon, where it had already been
effectively excluded? The answer is twofold. In the first place,
the Wilmot Proviso went much farther than any other legal pro-
hibition had ever gone. It would have pledged the faith of the
nation to guarantee the freedom of the soil for all future time.
This, in Douglas's view, was unconstitutional, because the federal
government had no power thus to abridge the freedom of future
states. In the second place, Oregon was far north of the Missouri
Compromise line, while nearly half of the former Mexican lands
were south of that line. The unconditional prohibition which
would, on its face, have been an unrepealable prohibition was
vastly more irritating.

Yet there is a third reason: the Oregon bill passed in 1848. At
that time Douglas was striving with might and main to extend
the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. By 1850 he had
abandoned this cause as hopeless. That the legislation of 1850,
in Douglas's mind, caused a change in the moral status of the

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE I 127

Missouri Compromise can be shown from his speeches just before
and after the mid-century "measures of adjustment." In 1849
Douglas made the Springfield speech quoted at length by Lin-
coln in his Peoria speech of 1854 ^d by the Republican Commit-
tee in 1860. We give some leading passages:

The Missouri Compromise had been in practical operation
for about a quarter of a century, and had received the sanc-
tion and approbation of men of all parties in every section
of the Union. It had allayed all sectional jealousies and
irritations growing out of this vexed question, and harmo-
nized and tranquiLlzed the whole country ... it had its origin
in the hearts of all patriotic men, who desired to preserve
and perpetuate the blessings of our glorious Union an origin
akin that of the Constitution of the United States, conceived
in the same spirit of fraternal affection, and calculated to
remove forever, the only danger, which seemed to threaten,
at some distant day, to sever the social bond of Union. All
the evidence of public opinion at that day, seemed to indicate
that this Compromise had been canonized in the hearts of
the American people, as a sacred thing which no ruthless
hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb.

Notice that Douglas says not a word about the function of the
Missouri Compromise with respect to the extension of slavery.
For him its wisdom consisted only in its soothing effect on sectional
passions. When Douglas made this speech he had already been
rebuffed in his efforts to extend the Missouri line. The "quarter
of a century" referred to would have ended in 1846 at the out-
break of the Mexican war. But it appears that he had not finally
abandoned the attempt to utilize the Missouri legislation's prestige
and was thus still trumpeting its supposed "sacredness." As we
shall presently see, it was the Wilmot Proviso, according to Doug-
las, which destroyed the halo about the Missouri line. But let us
listen to Douglas, in a speech to the Senate in December 1851,
reviewing his course in the troubled years ending with the
Compromise of 1850:

... I will take a brief review of my course on the whole
slavery agitation, and show clearly and distinctly the princi-
ples upon which my action upon the subject has always been
governed. ... I have always opposed the introduction of the

128 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

subject of slavery into the halls of Congress for any purpose
either for discussion or action except in the cases enjoined
by the Constitution of the United States, as in the case of
the reclamation of fugitives from labor . . . When the stormy
agitation arose in connection with the annexation of Texas,
I originated and first brought forward the Missouri Compro-
mise as applicable to that Territory, and had the gratification
to see it incorporated in the bill which annexed Texas to
the United States. I did not deem it a matter of much moment
as applicable to Texas alone, but I did conceive it to be of
vast importance in view of the probable acquisition of New
Mexico and California. My preference for the Missouri Com-
promise was predicated on the assumption that the whole
people of the United States would be more easily reconciled
to that measure than to any other mode of adjustment; and
this assumption rested upon the fact that the Missouri Com-
promise had been the means of an amicable settlement of
a fearful controversy in 1821, which had been acquiesced
in cheerfully and cordially by the people for more than a
quarter of a century, and which all parties and sections of
the Union professed to respect and cherish as a fair, just, and
honorable settlement. I could discover no reason for the
application of the Missouri line to all the territory owned
by the United States in 1821 that would not apply with equal
force to its extension to the Rio Grande and also to the
Pacific, so soon as we should acquire the country.

Douglas then detailed his struggle against the Wilmot Proviso,
and his efforts to extend the Missouri line. The Wilmot Proviso
was finally defeated by circumvention in the peace treaty. And
the Senate, by a large majority, accepted Douglas's proposal to
extend the Missouri line to the Pacific; but it was heavily de-
feated in the House, where the Proviso men were largely in
control. After that, Douglas told how he too finally "abandoned"
the Missouri Compromise. This is of great moment, because in
1854 *h e entire free-soil opinion of the nation reviled Douglas
for asserting that the Compromise of 1850 had in any way touched
the Missouri Compromise, that anyone in voting on New Mexico
or Utah had ever dreamed the Missouri Compromise was in-
volved. A major portion of Lincoln's Peoria speech is devoted
to denouncing this proposition, as the inflammatory Appeal of

REPEAL OF THE MISSOUBI COMPROMISE I 129

the Independent Democrats had done almost at the moment the
repeal was proposed. Moreover, the flat contradiction of Douglas
by the free-soilers, and vice versa, is paralleled by equally flat
contradictions, nearly a century later, by professional historians
of the highest authority. First let us hear Douglas in 1851:

At the opening of the next session [the second day of the
Thirtieth Congress], upon consultation with the friends of
the measure, it was generally conceded-with perhaps, here
and there an individual exception that there was no hope
left for the Missouri Compromise, and consequently some
other plan of adjustment must be devised. I was reluctant
to give up the Missouri Compromise, having been the first
to bring it forward, and having struggled for it in both houses
of Congress for about five years ... I gave it up reluctantly,
to be sure and conceived the idea of a bill to admit Califor-
nia as a State, leaving the people to form a constitution and
settle the question of slavery afterwards to suit themselves
. . . The great argument in favor of this bill was that it
recognized the right of the people to determine all questions
relating to their domestic concerns in their own way . . .
Mr. President, I may be permitted here to pause and remark
that, during the period of five years that I was laboring for
the adoption of the Missouri Compromise, my votes on the
Oregon question, and upon all incidental questions touching
slavery, were given with reference to a settlement on that
basis, and are consistent with it. 7

Douglas, in retrospect, "gave up" the Missouri Compromise in
1848. This might seem to contradict his praise of it in 1849.
However, his first countermove was to propose the admission of
the entire Mexican acquisition as the single state of California,
only reserving the right to Congress, whenever it might choose
to exercise it, to form new states out of any portion of California
that lay east of the Sierra Nevada. This was a breath-taking
proposal, and we must pause to consider it. We should recall
it was made when the gold rush was already on. A "great revolu-
tion has taken place in the prospects and condition of that country
since the adjournment of the last session of Congress," Douglas
said in making his proposal, and this revolution was such as made
it all but impossible that any decision in favor of Negro slavery
would ever be made by the hordes of settlers and prospectors,

130 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

should Congress entrust them with that power. Slave property
was of all chattels the least movable to new regions. When slavery
spread in the United States, it was always from contiguous slave
states, by a kind of natural extension of an existing economy.
But California was now being reached mainly by the long sea
route only later was it common to go overland. In any case,
slaveowners had little or no incentive to risk expensive slaves in
a distant region whose soil and climate were relatively untested
in regard to slave staples. Moreover, this was a period when the
old cotton kingdom was entering its greatest boom, when slaves
could be sold or employed very profitably without the trouble
or risk of sending them to such distant places as California. And,
as noted above, there was cheap Mexican labor almost for the
asking in California. Douglas was certain, far more certain than
Webster ever had a right to be concerning New Mexico, that
slavery would be forbidden in California if the settlers were left
to decide the matter for themselves.

But this was only one dimension of his proposal. The other
was that, by making the whole Mexican acquisition one state,
the decision against slavery taken by the settlers on the Pacific
coast would automatically be extended over the whole of the
remaining Mexican acquisition, or what became the territories
of Utah and New Mexico. In short, Douglas's proposal was an
indirect but an almost certainly more effective anti-slavery pro-
posal than the Wilmot Proviso itself! Although it contained no
promise such as the Wilmot Proviso attempted, that the states
Congress might later choose to carve out of California east of the
Sierra Nevada would exclude slavery a promise he believed
could not have been fulfilled if challenged, since Congress had
no constitutional right to make it it would have absolutely pre-
cluded such a thing as the New Mexican territorial slave code
of 1859. Indeed, Douglas s proposal would have cut almost the
whole Gordian knot of constitutional entanglements with the
slavery questions. It would have ended all controversy concerning
the effect of the Mexican law against slavery; it would have
ended the dispute over whether the Constitution automatically
carried slavery into the former Mexican provinces or automati-
cally excluded it; it would have ended the question of whether,
among the "rightful subjects" to which the territorial legislative
powers extended, slavery was included. It would probably also
have deprived the Dred Scott decision, in advance, of most of its

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE I iQi

power for mischief. It is hardly credible that there would have
been half the concern that slavery might enter Nebraska, if it
had already been excluded from the lands south and west of it
By skipping the territorial period for the whole Mexican ac-
quisition, and not only the area later included in California,
it would have made the California interdiction of slavery in the
entire Mexican acquisition as undeniably constitutional as that
which forbade it in New York or Massachusetts. This was stronger
anti-slavery medicine than the Northwest Ordinance or the Mis-
souri prohibition. It is strange that this, Douglas's most extreme
anti-slavery proposal, was never cited by the Republicans to
illustrate the extent of his later tergiversations. Perhaps the reason
is that the Wilmot Proviso men the predecessors of the anti-
Nebraska men did not rally to Douglas's support; for they were
still intent upon the direct interdiction of slavery and not satisfied
to accept it as a result of popular sovereignty. That Calhoun was
cold is understandable. The measure received little support and
was killed by the Senate judiciary committee.

It is desirable now to estimate the merit of Douglas's previous
espousal of the extension of the Missouri Compromise line. This
too had an anti-slavery aspect denied to it by Lincoln, for exam-
ple, in his Peoria speech. For the extension of the line would
have placed slavery under a categorical ban in all of the Utah
Territory and would have pushed the northern boundary of New
Mexico Territory down a degree and a half. It would also, in all
likelihood, have caused California to be divided into two states.
That, however, would have meant two free states instead of one,
since there was no difference between northern and southern
Califomians concerning the desirability of slavery. But further:
the extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific
would have meant a ban on slavery north of the line, while it
would not have done more than make slavery optional south of
the line. Now Lincoln said that he, in common with all Wilmot
Proviso stalwarts in the House, had steadily refused to support
the extension of the Missouri line because, by implication, it gave
up the territory south of it to slavery. Yet Lincoln's kader, Clay,
was chief architect of the Compromise of 1850, and Lincoln
eventually gave that Compromise at least tacit approval. And
the Compromise of 1850 opened all of Utah Territory and 01
of New Mexico Territory to slavery, to as great an extent as

132 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

Douglas had proposed to open to slavery only that part of New

Mexico which lay south of sG'ao". In short, the Wilmot Proviso
men Lincoln included, for he was in the House voting against
Douglas's proposed extension during his one term in Congress
eventually settled for, or were forced to accept, less than half the
loaf that Douglas had originally offered them. This must certainly
be kept in mind when evaluating Douglas's assertion, after the
repeal, that he had been faithful to the Missouri Compromise
when its supposed supporters had deserted it.

Chapter VI

The Repeal of the Missouri
Compromise II

DID THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 "SUPERSEDE* 3
THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE?

THE Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the
People of the United States, which fired the train attached to
the powder keg of anti-slavery passion in the free states, is re-
printed in the Congressional Globe under the date of January
19, 1854. To it is appended a note, presumably added on or after
January 23, since it responds to amendments to Douglas's revised
Nebraska bill which were reported only on that date. The note,
which follows, sets forth the bitter core of the controversy, thus:

The amended Nebraska bill, introduced by Mr. Douglas
[i.e., the bill introduced as a substitute for the Dodge bill
on January 4, 1854], was promptly printed at length in the
Washington Sentinel As printed, it did not meet the views
of certain southern gentlemen, and it was then discovered
that an important declaratory section, legislating into the bill
the principles of the compromise [of 1850] had been omit-
ted by a clerical error. Even after this remarkable clerical
error had been rectified, the bill was unsatisfactory, and now
Mr. Douglas proposes more amendments to divide the Ter-
ritory into two: to charge the Treasury with the expense of
two Territorial Governments; to strike out the clerical error
section, and insert elsewhere in the bill a clause excepting
from the laws of the United States, extended over the Terri-

134 THE CASE FOR

tory, the Missouri prohibition. The proposed amendment will
read thus:

"That the Constitution, and all laws of the United States,
which are not locally inapplicable, shall have the same force
and effect within die said Territory of Nebraska as else-
where within the United States, except the eighth section
of the act preparatory to the admission of Missouri into the
Union, approved March 6, 1820, which was superseded by
the principles of the legislation of 1850, commonly catted the
compromise measures, and is hereby declared inoperative."

This amendment is a manifest falsification of the truth of
history, as is shown in the body of the foregoing address. Not
a man in Congress or out of Congress, in 1850, pretended
that the compromise measures would repeal the Missouri
prohibition. Mr. Douglas himself never advanced such a
pretence until this session. His own Nebraska Bill of last
session rejected it. It is a sheer afterthought. To declare
the prohibition inoperative, may, indeed, have effect in law
as a repeal, but it a most discreditable way of reaching the
object Will the people permit their dearest interests to be
thus made the mere hazards of a presidential game, and
destroyed by false facts and false inferences?

We observe that the original "repeal" clause only declared the
Missouri Compromise "superseded" and hence "inoperative," al-
though in its final form die bill added "and void." Concerning
the "truth of history," we now summon two recent witnesses. Allan
Nevins writes as follows: 1

One essential question of fact was raised by Douglas's bill
and the accompanying report. Had Congress, applying the
popular sovereignty principle to the newly conquered and
peculiar region of New Mexico and Utah, really intended
universal application of that principle to all areas not yet
organized? Had it intended a repeal of the long-revered, the
supposedly inviolable, Missouri Compromise? If it had, then
most members of Congress in 1850 had grossly deceived
themselves. Douglas had not once hinted during the debates
of 1850 that the new Compromise altered the position of
the huge unorganized area of the Missouri Valley.

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE H 135

And again:

The thinness of Douglas's arguments of precedence, the ob-
vious shiftiness and subterfuge of his course, inspired instant
question of his motives.

And finally: 2

As for Douglas's statement that the Utah-New Mexico legis-
lation in the Compromise of 1850 had established a new
"principle" which must be extended to all other territories,
this was simply dishonest.

But with regard to the identical "question of fact," we find
Professor Randall taking an exactly contrary position. In his com-
mentary on the debates, Randall writes: 3

. . . they [Lincoln and Douglas] were concentrating on the
question whether Federal prohibition of slavery in western
territories, having been dropped after full discussion in 1850,
should be revived as if it were the only means of dealing with
the highly improbable chance that human bondage would
ever take root in such places as Kansas, Nebraska, or New
Mexico.

Randall's language is even stronger than Douglas's in his original
repeal clause, in which, as noted, Douglas only said that the 1850
legislation had "superseded" the Missouri Compromise, rendering
it "inoperative." Randall says flatly that the federal prohibition
of slavery in "western territories," by which he explicitly means
Kansas and Nebraska as well as New Mexico, was "dropped"
in 1850. Now we do not know anyone, least of all Professor Nevins,
who would suggest that Professor Randall ever dishonestly or
manifestly falsified the truth of history. Is not Randall's endorse-
ment of Douglas's interpretation of the 1850 compromise, in the
face of Nevins's equally unqualified acceptance of the Inde-
pendent Democrats', a manifest sign that the "truth of history '
is open to manifestly opposite interpretations and that the "facts"
speak differently to different men?

As to the charge that "not a man in Congress or out of Con-
gress" pretended that the 1850 measures affected the status of
the 1820 law, the reply depends upon whether one thinks in nar-
rowly legalistic or broadly political terms. We have seen that
Douglas declared in 1851 that the 1850 measures were predi-

136 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

cated upon the abandonment of the Missouri Compromise. To be
sure, Douglas referred technically to the non-extension of the line
to the Pacific. But when he said that he "could discover no reason
for the application of the Missouri line to all the territory owned
by the United States in 1821 that would not apply with equal
force to its extension ... to the Pacific," the inference is almost
inescapable that its non-extension had a broader bearing on the
whole sectional controversy than what was involved in determin-
ing the fate of Utah or New Mexico. Whether or not Douglas
was correct in his judgment of the equal applicability of the
Missouri line to the two acquisitions, it is consistent with this
belief to regard the refusal to extend the line as tantamount to
its "supersession."

The 1820 line, as Douglas saw it, attempted so to divide the
national territory that the public mind in the free states would
be satisfied that there was in federal law a guarantee that, of the
future states applying for admission, no less than half, in all
probability, would apply with constitutions prohibiting slavery.
It was a guarantee that the free states would not be outnumbered
by the slave states. Now by 1850 opinion in these same free states
was utterly unwilling to accept this kind of guarantee, although
the Senate, in which the slave states were relatively more power-
ful, was willing to give it. Why had free-state opinion shifted?
Had it not done so because the free states, having grown relatively
far more powerful in wealth and numbers, felt able to strike a
better intersectional bargain? Moreover, were not the anti-slavery
forces in the free states better organized and more militant? Did
not Douglas express a free-soil attitude when he said privately
to young George McConnel that to dispense with a dividing line
meant a "step toward freedom," because slavery could "no longer
crouch behind a line which Freedom could not cross"? As noted
above, the legal situation created by the Missouri line did not
forbid freedom on its southern side. What the law did was only
to forbid slavery to the north, while making it optional to the
south. Technically, that is, popular sovereignty ruled south of the
line. But the legal situation was not the real one, as is shown
by Lincoln's understanding that the line in fact reserved the lands
to the south of it for slavery. This was why, as Lincoln said in his
Peoria speech, the Wilmot Proviso men in the House would not
accept the extension of the Missouri line to the Pacific: they would
not, by implication, give up any new lands to slavery; they were

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE H 137

bent upon having them att free. But was this not an implied
endorsement of Douglas's interpretation of 1850? If free-state
men preferred having no line in new territory because a line
meant giving some lands up to slavery by implication, why should
they not prefer no line in aid territory, where the "supersession"
of die line would mean that freedom could, in all the confidence
of its new strength (for this was, remember, an "age of progress"),
wrest the unorganized lands south of 36'3o"? It is true that the
Proviso men, as such, never gave the 1850 measures unqualified
support, and many fought the fugitive law to the bitter end. Yet
moderate anti-slavery men like Lincoln, accepting Clay's and
Webster's leadership and, moreover, seeing California made ir-
retrievably free by local action, as Douglas ceaselessly pointed out
had in fact acquiesced to popular sovereignty in New Mexico
and Utah, as they had not done in the extension of the line. As
Douglas interpreted 1850, free-soil opinion in the free states had
then deemed the chances of freedom better everywhere under
popular sovereignty than under a dividing line which, by implica-
tion, gave up almost half the territories to slavery.

We thus see how Douglas, long before 1854, expressed his
understanding that popular sovereignty had "superseded" the
Missouri Compromise in 1850. In a precise sense, the Missouri
Compromise line, as a device for settling the slavery question in
the Mexican acquisition, was all that had been superseded. But
in politics, the narrow sense of an expression of such import can
easily glide into a larger sense without contradicting the general
understanding of its meaning. Of course "supersession" is not re-
peal, and the story of how supersession was transformed into
repeal remains to be told. For the present, we maintain only that
the language Douglas used in 1851 to explain the course he had
recently followed sufficiently justifies his statement in 1854 that
the abandonment of the Missouri Compromise as a device for
dealing with slavery in the former Mexican provinces constituted,
in his view, its supersession.

As evidence of the political intelligibility of this terminology,
we recall its ready acceptance by Professor Randall. The present
writer asked that eminent scholar, in the year before his death,
precisely what he had meant when he said that federal prohibi-
tion of slavery in western territories had been "dropped" in 1830,
since the Missouri Compromise was not repealed until 1854, nor

138 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

declared unconstitutional until 1857. I n a repty dated December

1952, he wrote that what he intended "was merely the obvious
fact that the proposal to pass a national law prohibiting slavery
in all [emphasis by Randall] the territories was not adopted.
This proposal," the letter continued, "favored by the Liberty and
Free Soil parties, and later by the Republican party, seems reason-
able and proper to us now, and is strengthened by admiration
for Lincoln, but in 1850 and in the decade of the fifties there
was virtually no chance that such a law could be passed by
Congress." Now a purist might object that something cannot be
"dropped" before it has been raised, and that no federal barrier
against slavery had been erected in Utah or New Mexico. The
Wilmot Proviso men, morever, had not sought a national law
against slavery in all the nation's territories, but only in the newly
acquired ones. This at least is affirmed by Lincoln in the Peoria
speech:

The most conclusive argument, however, that, while voting
for the Wilmot Proviso, and while voting against the extension
of the Missouri line, we never thought of disturbing the
original Missouri Compromise, is found in the fact that there
was then, and still is, an unorganized tract of fine country,
nearly as large as the state of Missouri, lying immediately
west of Arkansas, and south of the Missouri Compromise
line [the present state of Oklahoma]; and that we never
attempted to prohibit slavery in it ... In all our struggles
to prohibit slavery within our Mexican acquisitions, we never
so much as lifted a finger to prohibit it, as to this tract. 4

Clearly, Professor Randall saw the matter through Douglas's and
not Lincoln's eyes. The legislation of 1850, as Douglas and Randall
saw it, was a solution of the question of slavery in "all" the terri-
tories, because the struggle of 1850 involved the whole political
question of the future status of slavery in the Union. Moreover,
Professor Randall's apparent confusion of the struggle over the
Mexican territories with "all" the territories reproduces precisely
the ambiguity contained in Douglas's "supersession" thesis. And
in this ambiguity is contained one of the strongest justifications
of Douglas's policy in this period: for by opening Nebraska to
slavery, however hypothetical^, it also opened to freedom much
less hypothetically the future Oklahoma, which would have re-
mained written off to slavery by the precisionist Lincoln.

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE H log

Douglas, as we have seen, constantly identified the Missouri
Compromise with the line of sG^o" and treated the line as if it
were the "principle" of that compromise. In the same way he
found the popular-sovereignty provisions of the Utah and New
Mexico territorial bills to contain the "principle" of the Compro-
mise of 1850. Lincoln categorically denied that either the line
or the aforesaid provisions constituted any kind of principle what-
ever. Regarding the first, he said (in the Peoria speech):

Another fact showing the specific character of the Missouri
law showing that it intended no more than it expressed
showing that the line was not intended as a universal dividing
line between free and slave territory, present and prospective
north of which slavery could never go is the fact that by
that very law, Missouri came in as a slave state, north of the
line. If that law contained any prospective principle, the
whole law must be looked to in order to ascertain what that
principle was. And by this rule, the South could fairly con-
tend that inasmuch as they got one slave state north of the
line at the inception of the law, they have the right to another
given them north of it occasionally now and then in the
indefinite westward extension of the line. This demonstrates
the absurdity of attempting to deduce a prospective princi-
ple from the Missouri Compromise line. 5

But does Lincoln succeed in his demonstration? All the parts of
the Missouri Compromise may have been specific, yet all the facts
together must have been justified by some principle or prin-
ciples, for the compromise to deserve the respect of principled
men. And the justification of the Missouri Compromise was
assuredly that it preserved the Union while placing definite limits
to the number and extent of future slave states to be formed
upon the national domain. In the Missouri Compromise the
admission of Missouri was balanced by the admission of Maine.
Yet Maine was not a weighty desideratum, for the reason that
its admission could not have been indefinitely delayed solely be-
cause it was a free state. Certainly it was the prohibition of any
further slave states north of the line of 36'ao" that was the true
price exacted by the free states for Missouri's admission. That
Missouri itself lay north of the line may be viewed less as a sign
of the absence of any principle embodied in the line than as an
unprincipled exception to which the free states were compelled

140 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

because of their relative weakness in 1820-21. For the Missouri
Compromise was in fact a very poor bargain from an anti-slavery
point of view. Not only was Missouri north of the line but, as we
have seen, the adoption of a line contained an implied acquies-
cence in slavery in all states to be formed south of it. Arkansas,
south of the line, had been organized in 1819 and was, in 1820,
a much nearer candidate for admission than any territory likely
to be organized north of it. Arkansas did come into the Union,
in 1836, while Iowa was not admitted until 1846, and Minnesota
was not even given territorial organization until 1849. If the bird
in hand is twice as valuable, then the slave states certainly re-
ceived the greater consideration.

But what of the vast unorganized wilderness not yet known
in 1820 as Nebraska? We recall our assertion in Chapter IV
that no one before the Mexican War, and assuredly no one
in 1820, had certain (or even probable) knowledge that the
organization of states would proceed beyond a single tier on the
west bank of the Mississippi. If this had remained the case there
never would have been more than two free states north of Missouri
to balance the three slave states on the west bank. In a recent
study of the Missouri controversy, Professor Glover Moore 6 sur-
veys opinion in 1820-21 in quest of an answer to whether the
South favored and the North opposed the compromise because it
was thought the North's share was a worthless desert. The answer
to this question is a decided negative. It was generally believed
that the soil and climate of the region were healthy and fruitful.
Professor Moore does not raise directly the question we would
have liked answered; namely, whether the North or South ex-
pected free states in anything like the number that eventually
resulted north of the line. He adduces a wide scattering of views,
but nothing to suggest a widespread public expectation of future
free states except directly north of Missouri; i.e., from the lands
from which Iowa and Minnesota were to come. In view of the
strong conservative opposition to territorial expansion as repre-
sented by men like Webster, and the fact that the lands beyond
the west bank were secured "in perpetuity" to the Indians, it is
unlikely that general opinion could have foreseen more than the
two free states as consequences of the Missouri Compromise. It
is almost inconceivable that the South would have given it the
support it did for the Missouri Compromise resulted from an
overwhelming majority of southern votes combined with a small

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE H 141

minority of northern ones had a procession of another half dozen
free states been contemplated. What the Republicans were one
day to insist was "nominated in the bond," if it was so nominated,
must have been in exceedingly fine print in 1820. It is one of the
ironies of history that the tremendous expansion of the forties,
which received much of its impulse from the desire for new lands
for slavery, transformed the old Missouri Compromise into a far
more favorable anti-slavery bargain than it could reasonably have
been supposed to be at the time it was made! This suggests an
explanation of the sanctity that it achieved in the eyes of a man
like Lincoln. But it also suggests a moral if not a technical legal
justification for Douglas's attempt to identify the Missouri Com-
promise with the Missouri line. For, as we have shown, the
employment of the line at the end of the Mexican War was far
more favorable to the free-soil cause than its original employment
had been. The principle that would have justified its original
employment if any did would thus certainly seem to have
justified its extension. And if this is true, then was not Douglas
justified, in virtue of the familiar shorthand vocabulary of politics,
in identifying the principle with its application?

Lincoln similarly denied that any new principle had been
established by the 1850 compromises which superseded the
alleged Missouri "principle."

The particular part of those measures [Lincoln said in the
Peoria speech], for [sic] which the virtual repeal of the
Missouri Compromise is sought to be inferred (for it is ad-
mitted they contain nothing about it, in express terms) is the
provision in the Utah and New Mexico laws, which permits
them when they seek admission into the Union as States, to
come in with or without slavery as they shall then see fit Now
I insist this provision was made for Utah and New Mexico,
and for no other place whatever. It had no more direct
reference to Nebraska than it had to the territories of the
moon. But, say they, it had reference to Nebraska, in princi-
ple. Let us see. The North consented to this provision, not
because they considered it right in itself; but because they
were compensated-paid for it-They, at the same time got
California into the Union as a free State. This was far the
best part of all they had struggled for by the Wilmot Proviso.

142 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

They also got the area of slavery somewhat narrowed in the
settlement of the boundary of Texas. Also, they got the slave
trade abolished in the District of Columbia. For all these
desirable objects the North could afford to yield something;
and they did yield to the South the Utah and New Mexico
provisions. 7

But the inference that Lincoln permits in this passage, that the
Utah and New Mexico provision was a sheer concession by the
free states, is a possible but not a necessary inference. The North
made another concession in 1850, which Lincoln duly recorded
in an earlier account of the 1850 compromise in this same Peoria
speech. It was a concession that achieved a far greater contem-
porary notoriety; namely, the new Fugitive Slave Law. The
abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and the
reduction of Texas's boundaries were more than paid for, in most
northern eyes, by the infernal statute that paid a federal judge
five dollars for setting an alleged fugitive free and ten dollars for
declaring him an escaped slave. But what of California? Did the
North really have to "pay" an additional price for California in
the form of the popular-sovereignty provisions of the Utah and
New Mexico laws? Zachary Taylor never thought so, nor did
William H. Seward. And Stephen A. Douglas did not think so
when he proposed bringing the entire Mexican acquisition into
the Union as the state of California. And, as we have already
stressed, the extension of the Missouri line to the Pacific would
have involved acquiescence in California's (or the Calif ornias')
statehood without as much concession to slavery as had been
made in 1820-21. In short, it is not necessary to regard the 1850
territorial laws, as Lincoln regarded them, as a concession by the
North. Or, if they are to be so regarded, the concession can be
attributed to the Wilmot Proviso men (of whom Lincoln was
a stalwart), who had raised the South's price for the admission
of California by refusing to accept it without imposing terms
humilating to the slave states.

We have argued that, by a legitimate construction of Douglas's
pre-i854 statements, he was justified in his subsequent assertion
that the measures of adjustment of 1850 had "superseded" the
Missouri Compromise. Yet it would be unnecessary and unwise
to claim that what existed as a possible and legitimate construction

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE H 140

existed contemporaneously as a clear-cut public understanding.
Douglas gave what might be called a creative interpretation of
1850 (including his own role therein), an interpretation sup-
ported by the facts, which nonetheless brought the facts of 1850
into a focus different from that of 1850, a focus designed for
1854. As we shall see, this was just what Lincoln did with the
anti-slavery policy of the Founding Fathers. Lincoln assumed that
a subordinate aspect of their thoughts and measures would have
retained the same value had it become paramount But Lincoln
did not know what sacrifices Jefferson or Washington would have
made for their anti-slavery convictions if the price of maintaining
them had been enormously increased. Jefferson, in particular,
wavered woefully in his last years. At the time of the Missouri
crisis in 1820, he took a distinctly southern position, looking upon
the anti-slavery agitation in the North as a Federalist plot to
break up the political dynasty he had founded in i8oo 8 and
which had ruled unchallenged thereafter. In particular, he ac-
cepted the "diffusionist" thesis, that allowing slavery to spread
into new country such as Missouri did not tend to its perpetuation
but only spread it "thinner." Lincoln was to blast and wither
this argument and to heap upon it his bitterest contempt. But
its connection with Jefferson is carefully concealed; only senti-
ments worthy of the hero of the Declaration and the patron of
the Northwest Ordinance are presented to our view. Lincoln does
much the same with Henry Clay, who had no real connection
with the slavery restriction in the Missouri Compromise. All that
Clay actually did was to get the slave state of Missouri into the
Union in 1821 while free-soil opinion in the North was still resist-
ing its admission because of the discrimination against free Ne-
groes in Missouri's constitution. Others had got the slavery restric-
tion written into the enabling act of 1820. A few of Clay's eloquent
moral condemnations of slavery are quoted by Lincoln over and
over again. But the policy that Lincoln framed, and adorned with
famous names, was his own. Both Lincoln and Douglas sought
precedents for what they wanted, and the precedents were worth
little more than what they wanted them for. Each had independ-
ent arguments sufficient to convince himself, but in politics it is
a good rule not to appear to do anything for the first time. History
as precedent is an essential ingredient of political life; it is often
a necessary condition of such stability and intelligibility as politics
aspire to. Yet the discovery by the true statesman of the

144 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

right precedents is as much an act of imaginative perception
as that whereby any great teller of old tales renews the life of a
people for the present and the future by a vision of the past.

Supersession, we have observed, is not synonymous with repeal.
Douglas, we say, intended to "supersede" the Missouri Compro-
mise in 1854 but not to repeal it. That distinction now requires
elaboration and explanation. What we believe is that Douglas
intended in 1854 that repeal of the Missouri Compromise remain
a possible inference, in the same way that supersession of the
Missouri Compromise was, in 1850, a possible inference from the
Compromise of 1850. What would remain as a possible inference
in 1854 m ight then be presented as a necessary inference on some
future occasion, when the practical question would not involve
lands north of 36'so".

What Douglas sought above all else in January 1854 was *
make the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which had been an
article of languid party faith since Cass's Nicholson letter in the
'48 campaign, into a passionate creed. Hitherto it had been
strongly held only by the northwestern Democracy; Cass was
senator from Michigan. As a party doctrine for resolving the
slavery controversy, and for laying the foundation for an American
empire, popular sovereignty was something of a novelty.

Its aptness for American party politics lay in its shrewd turning
to political advantage of some of the deepest-rooted American
traditions. TocqueviUe's Democracy in America was written on
the basis of observations made during the formative years of
Lincoln's and Douglas's adolescence and early manhood. And
Tocqueville began his study, not with the federal government,
but with the states. And the key to understanding the states he
found in the township.

The form of the Federal government of the United States
was the last to be adopted; and it is in fact nothing more
than a summary of those republican principles which were
current in the whole community before it existed, and in-
dependently of its existence . . . The great political princi-
ples which now govern American society undoubtedly took
their origin and their growth in the state ... It is not without
intention that I begin this subject with the township . . .
municipal institutions constitute the strength of free nations.

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE H IAJ-

Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to
science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach
men how to use and how to enjoy it. A nation may establish
a free government, but without municipal institutions it can-
not have the spirit of liberty. 9

What Douglas meant to do was to appeal to the spirit of, and
attachment to, the principles of town-meeting democracy as a way
of removing the slavery incubus from American politics. In Illinois
itself, this spirit had been appealed to successfully as settlers from
the Northeast and the South had clashed on the subject of town-
ship versus county government. The Illinois constitution of 1847,
allowing local options, had reconciled these conflicting demands.
As already noted, the moral condemnation of slavery emanated
largely from the evangelical movement in radical Protestantism,
itself in large measure a re-creation of the Puritan spirit But the
town meeting was a secular by-product of the congregational
form of church government which characterized the Puritan
bodies in old New England. The profound attractiveness of the
popular-sovereignty idea lay in its seizing upon the old and deep
connection of the idea of morality with the idea of local self-
government. This connection might thus be used to neutralize, if
not to defeat, the moral fervor of the anti-slavery crusade emanat-
ing from other roots in that same tradition. The spirit of local
independence had, of course, received new vitality from the
conditions of western community life. It was not the aristocratic
families of the old South who tended to migrate the ones who
ruled their counties like English squires and, we might add, were
probably more accustomed to episcopal than congregational
church government. To them popular sovereignty was anathema,
as it was to the abolitionists, who meant to impose their moral
ideas in the spirit of Cromwell's saints. But Douglas believed
it in accordance with that spirit of moderation and mutual trust
which alone made democratic government possible.

One further point, by way of prologue to the analysis of Doug-
las's Senate report: that is to remark upon the congeniality in
public opinion of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, as a loosely
held general idea, and the Missouri Compromise. We have seen
that Douglas advocated and believed in the effective adoption
of popular sovereignty in the territorial legislation of 1850, yet also
believed in the continued legal effect of the Mexican anti-slavery

146 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

law. In Missouri, in November 1853, where excitement over
Nebraska was then keenest and where Thomas Hart Benton, anti-
slavery leader of the state's Democracy, was locked in political
death battle with the pro-slavery Democratic leader David
Atchison, we find resolutions passed at meetings of Benton's
partisans that ". . . we are in favor of the people who go there
[Nebraska] and settle to determine the question as to whether
it shall be a slave or free state"; and, almost in the same breath,
that *. . . we are opposed to the agitation of the slavery question
in the organization of this Territory by any attempt to repeal
the Missouri Compromise." 10 Of course popular opinion before
the repeal was hardly conscious that the 1850 laws were silent
as to whether the people who went to the Southwest to settle
and decide in favor of free or slave states might go with or without
slaves. The public, not yet instructed by Douglas in the nature
of the differences undecided in 1850, permitted itself to desire
and believe in things that were presently to appear incompatible.
Yet we must emphasize the extent to which general opinion, and
in particular free-soil opinion, on the eve of Douglas's Nebraska
bill of 1854, was prepared to respond to the popular-sovereignty
appeal, without any sense of jar to its attachment to the Missouri
Compromise.

Chapter VII

The Repeal of the Missouri
Compromise III

WHAT DOUGLAS INTENDED ON
JANUARY 4, 1854

OF ALL criticisms of Douglas's course in 1854, none appears on
its face to be more devastating than that drawn from the evidence
of the 1853 Nebraska bill. "In 1853," said Lincoln at Peoria, "a bill
to give [Nebraska] a territorial government passed the House of
Representatives [by a vote of 98 to 43, with 20 affirmative votes
from slave states], and, in the hands of Judge Douglas, failed
of passing the Senate only for want of time. This bill contained
no repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Indeed, when it was
assailed because it did not contain such repeal, Judge Douglas
defended it in its existing form." 1 In the principal Senate speech
for the 1853 bill Senator Atchison of Missouri had spoken thus:

Now, sir, I am free to admit at this moment, at this hour,
and for all time to come, I should oppose the organization
or the settlement of that Territory unless my constituents
and the constituents of the whole South, of the slave States
of the Union, could go into it upon the same footing, with
equal rights and equal privileges, carrying that species of
property with them . . . Yes, sir, I acknowledge that that
would have governed me, but I have no hope that the re-
striction will ever be repealed. 2

Because, Atchison continued, the tide of population would roll
over the Nebraska frontier in defiance of law, unless law was

148 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

provided, it was as well to organize the territory now as later.
As to its chances, Atchison spoke thus:

I trust now that the bill will be taken up, and that we will act
upon it and pass it ... The President will sign it, as a matter
of course, if he signs any of the appropriation bills. There is
no question about that We have votes enough, and I have no
doubt but there is a majority of the Senate in favor of the
organization of the Territory of Nebraska, if you will only
give us an opportunity to vote. 8

And Douglas, concluding the discussion in the early hours of
the morning of March 4, 1853 (Franklin Pierce was to be in-
augurated at noon), remarked:

I have merely said as much as was necessary to vindicate
the action of the Committee; and now I should be delighted
if the Senate, by common consent, would unite and pass
die bill; for if it be taken up, I am sure it will be passed. My
fears are that it will not be taken up. 4

Douglas's fears were justified. The bill was never voted upon.
On a motion to lay it on the table, the vote was yeas 23, nays 17.
A shift of four votes and the tempest of the year following, in
which the Republican party was born, might have been avertedl
According to George Fort Milton, "Once more Southern opposi-
tion kept a Territory from being organized," for the bill, he says,
was set aside by "an almost exclusively sectional vote." 6 However,
this is misleading, for among those voting to shelve the bill were
senators from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont,
and Connecticut And a third of the Senate was absent, including
some of the strongest free-soilers. Even more difficult to under-
stand, in the ligfrt of the Atchison speech, is Professor Randall's
statement 6 that "the Missouri Compromise . . . was in 1854
beyond the sphere of practical politics," or that "anti-slavery
people . . . had no better chance in 1854 ^^^ &&* offered by
the Douglas bill . . .^ Professor Randall seems, again, to be con-
fusing the political effort needed to re-enact the Missouri Com-
promise restriction with what was needed merely to leave it alone.
As to the "chance" offered by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the
question is why Douglas did not simply report the Dodge bill,
introduced in December 1853, which was Ate same bill he had
supported the previous March. In this connection we reproduce

REPEAL OF THE MISSOUBI COMPROMISE m 149

the following interesting colloquy that took place during those
after-midnight hours of March 4, 1853, when that early Nebraska
bill was so unfortunately set aside. Almost the whole discussion,
we should mention, had concerned the rights of Indians in
Nebraska, an issue which could be, and was, discussed by
northern and southern men as if no sectional question were in-
volved.

MR. ADAMS. I know that my friend from Illinois is a good
compromise man, and I wish to propose to him a compromise
on this subject, and that is, that by common consent it be
postponed until the Friday after the first Monday of Decem-
ber next, when we shall have ample time and opportunity
to discuss and investigate it; and if we think it right we can
then pass the bill.

ME. DOUGLAS. I must remind my friend from Mississippi that
eight years ago, when he and I were members of the House
of Representatives, I was then pressing the Nebraska bill,
and I have ever since been pressing it I have tried to get it
through for eight long years. I would take it as much more
kind if my friend should propose that by common consent
we take up and pass the bill. The members of the body are
in very good humor, all having got what they have wanted
except the Territories. I hope we shall do something for
them. 8

This passage is extremely revealing of the vastly different atmos-
phere surrounding the 1853 bill. Douglas even had hopes of
slipping it through by common consent, without a roll-call vote,
in the rush of adjournment business! His reference to "eight long
years" is factually correct, although it must have been said without
any great sense of urgency. Douglas had not said a word about
Nebraska in Congress for tie last several of those eight years.
But most significant of all is the expectation, voiced by Adams
of Mississippi, that the bill might be taken up the following
December and passed without much difficulty after the matters
under debate mostly concerning the Indians could be ironed
out.

Now there may, of course* have been more opposition to the
1853 bill than Douglas and Atdbison in 1853 or Lincoln in 1854
admitted. It was natural for Douglas and Atchison to exaggerate

150 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

the support the bill had, as an argument for bringing it to a vote.
They had a common interest in such a bill, since a chain of
territorial governments in mid-continent would make possible
central and/or northern railroad routes to the Pacific. While Ne-
braska was closed, the only organized territories across which such
roads could be built lay between Texas and southern California.
And Atchison and Douglas represented the interests of St. Louis
and Chicago. Conservative pro-slavery menthe great Whig
slaveowners who had opposed the Mexican Warnever desired
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. They much preferred
to keep Nebraska closed, both as a means of keeping out new
free states and because the southern railroad route meant an
economic advantage to the South. Moreover, they still maintained
their alliance with the millowners, the "cotton Whigs" of the North.
Crocodile tears could always be shed for the Indians as a way
of opposing the organization of new territories. And here we note
a constitutional eccentricity whose influence is imponderable but
may have been great. To admit settlers lawfully into Nebraska,
it was necessary to extinguish Indian claims, which encompassed
virtually the entire region. We need not enter the maze of com-
plicated interactions of municipal and international law, but only
note that new treaties might have been necessary to extinguish
the claims, and new treaties could be defeated in the Senate
by one third plus one of the votes.

Sometime in the intervening ten months Douglas certainly de-
cided that a completely new approach to the Nebraska question
was in order. He may have felt that only a new approach, which
would create a positive nationwide interest in the measure, could
overwhelm the "old fogies" North and South. In our judgment,
that interest was to be created, not so much by specific expecta-
tions with regard to Nebraska the demands of prospective
homesteaders and the railroad interests, for example, were not
enough but by the erection of popular sovereignty, as we have
said, into a national dogma. And popular sovereignty, thus canon-
ized, would be the basis in national opinion upon which a policy
for action in a much broader field than Nebraska might be
erected. As we have argued in the chapter on Manifest Destiny,
Douglas had during these months become disappointed with
Pierce's leadership, and the party was tearing itself to pieces.
The Whig party had supplied the chief leadership, in Clay and
Webster, for the 1850 compromise. But the Whig party had been

BEPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE HI 151

dealt a death blow by outraged free-soil opinion as a consequence.
The tensions which destroyed the WMgs were now racking the
Democrats, particularly in the North. Something dramatic had
to be done. Douglas, we have said, determined upon the greatest
assertion of political leadership possible to a Senate chairman of
the Committee on Territories. This could not have been accom-
plished by the mere endorsement of the old Nebraska bill.
Moreover, the opening of the Thirty-third Congress was the first
under a Democratic administration since the retirement of Polk,
and the first since the 1850 "measures of adjustment." It was not
possible for Douglas, the previous year, to make a statement,
such as he was now to make, the basis of party orthodoxy, if the
bill had had to be signed by a Whig president. And it was essential
to Douglas's 1854 plans and projects that he become the high
priest of the party's faith.

Douglas's intentions, in sidetracking Senator Dodge's old Ne-
braska bill and bringing in an entirely new one, accompanied
by an elaborate report, must now be gleaned from that report.
This document, a masterpiece of political rhetoric, deserves the
closest scrutiny by every student of the legislative process. Of it
we may say what Macaulay said of the Toleration Act, that w it
will not bear to be tried by sound general principles. Nay it will
not bear to be tried by any principle, sound or unsound/' And
yet not quite so. Unlike the English with their "national distaste
for whatever is abstract in political science/* the sensitive and
inflammatory public for whom Douglas wrought conceived of
their demands in terms of general principles. Douglas's report also
abounds in contradictions, but whereas the great English law
achieved its purpose by an innocent disregard of its own incon-
sistencies, Douglas's report is highly and articulately self-con-
scious on this subject. Since his public demanded principles, and
since principled differences are peculiarly difficult to compromise,
Douglas attempted to make the ignoring of principled differences
itself a principle. Yet, again, this is not entirely correct It fits one
of Douglas's arguments, wherein he says, in substance: In 1850
we struck a good bargain, a bargain in which each party got
something and gave something, and which all greatly preferred
to the alternative, which would have been no bargain, but dis-

152 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

union. But this bargain, Douglas shows, was accepted by the
different parties for different reasons and understood in different
terms. If any attempt had been made to reach agreement on the
reasons for the compromise, there could have been no compro-
mise. The moral, however, should have been: Let us now follow
the precedent of 1850 and ask what it is each party hopes to
accomplish by a Nebraska bill and see if there is not an attainable
common denominator of these demands. It is not the moral
Douglas draws, however. He has another argument, which intro-
duces a new level of contradiction. And while Douglas points
clearly to the one kind of contradiction, he shrewdly averts
attention from the other. Instead of the superficial inconsistency
of an "agreement to disagree," Douglas moves on to associate
a simple dictate of prudence with a new higher principle. This
new higher principle, of course, is popular sovereignty. However,
on the evidence Douglas himself offers in the report, no one in
1850 subordinated any differences of principle to the supervening
principle of popular sovereignty. The warring factions of 1850
no more agreed on popular sovereignty, on committing "all ques-
tions pertaining to slavery in the territories ... to the decision
of the people residing therein," than the warring sects in 1689
had agreed that "mere theological error ought not to be punished
by the civil magistrate." According to Macaulay, This principle
the Toleration Act not only does not recognize, but positively
disclaims. . . Persecution continues to be the general rule. Tolera-
tion is the exception." But in 1689 the exceptions were sufficient
to accomplish most of what would have been accomplished had
the principle of toleration been recognized. The right end was
achieved, but for the wrong reasons.

So in 1850, California could have been admitted and New
Mexico and Utah organized on the popular-sovereignty principle,
but they were not The conflicting claims of the Wilmot Proviso
men on the one hand and the Calhoun-Davis men on the other
tended to cancel each other out as the bargain was struck, but
the negative act of abstaining from any decision whatever on the
merits of these positions (as Douglas points out was done) was
not a positive affirmation of any third position. Treating the nega-
tive as if it were a positive affirmation, while yet declaring that
there was no positive affirmation, is what transforms Douglas's
report from the level of superficial to that of profound inner con-
tradiction. It is as if someone had told the English people four

BEPEAL OF THE MISSOUBI COMPROMISE HI 153

years after the Toleration Act that they had repudiated the
principle of persecution and adopted the principle of religious
liberty. The principle of religious liberty was not recognized in
English law for nearly another century and a half. In like manner,
Wilmot Proviso men did not abandon the principle of congres-
sional exclusion of slavery in the territories; but while still assert-
ing the principle, as Webster did in his March 7 (1850) speech,
they relaxed their demand as unnecessary in the circumstances.
In like manner, Calhoun-Davis men, while continuing to believe
in the right to protection of slave property in tibe territories, abated
that demand in the face of the uncertainty that slaveowners would
go into New Mexicoor, perhaps, believing that if they did they
would be able to protect this property themselves (even as the
neighboring Texans had done) so long as no positive ban existed
in federal law. The only question concerning slavery distinctly
left to the decision of the people of the territories by the 1850
legislation had to do with the constitutions with which they might
one day apply for admission to the Union. It had nothing to do
with the status of slavery during the territorial period. The 1850
laws, as we shall see Douglas aver in his report, were silent on
this question. Perhaps this may have meant allowing the people
residing therein to decide. But a decision by default is hardly a
higher principle, and Douglas's sleight-of-hand consists precisely
in his attempt to produce the appearance of such a principle, not
only despite this evidence, but from this evidence. That he does
in large measure succeed is evidence of a supreme piece of politi-
cal legerdemain a virtuoso sleight-of-hand trick, in which a
principle, like a rabbit, is pulled from a principle-proof hat!

"The principal amendments which your committee deem it
their duty to recommend to the favorable action of the Senate,**
Douglas began in his famous special Senate report of January 4,

1854,

are those in which the principles established by the compro-
mise measures of 1850, so far as they are applicable to terri-
torial organizations, are proposed to be affirmed and carried
into practical operation within the limits of the new Territory.
The wisdom of those measures is attested, not less by their
salutary and beneficial effects, in allaying sectional agitation
and restoring peace and hannony to an irritated and dis~

THE CASE FOE

tracted people, than by tie cordial and almost universal
approbation with which they have been received and sanc-
tioned by the whole country.

The report thus begins with a hypothesis which is something of
a paradox: that compromise measures established principles. That
this Is even more than a paradox will appear when Douglas says
in the report that there was in 1850 no agreement beyond the
specific terms of the Utah and New Mexico 1850 territorial laws.
And tihere is this further implicit contradiction: Donglas alludes
to the existence of parts of the Compromise of 1850 other than
the territorial laws. What right does he have to assume that what
is part of a larger whole can stand on its feet as a precedent
apart from that whole? We have already shown that an argument
can be made to the effect that other parts of the Compromise,
as parts of a bargain, balanced and canceled each other and that
this part might stand alone. But this required such a demonstration
as we have suggested; it is hardly warranted as an assumption.
One cannot assume without proof that one particular part of a
compromise embodies the "principle" of the compromise more
than any other parts of the compromise. Further: the idea of "cor-
dial and almost universal approbation" is, to put it mildly, a some-
what overoptimistic viewing of the scene in the free states that
greeted, for example^ the Fugitive Slave Law. It is true that the
counfay, weary with strife, had quieted down in the realization
that disunion or war would probably result from any attempt to
reopen the controversy. But the immolation of the Whig party
upon the altar of the compromise was hardly evidence of its vast
popularity. It is true that both the "major" parties had in 1852 en-
dorsed, with uncertain enthusiasm, the settlement of 1850. But
one of them was already well on the way to becoming a minor
party, and the other was being threatened with a similar fate.
What Douglas was in fact attempting in these sonorous opening
paragraphs was not history but a new propaganda in favor of the
1850 measures, a propaganda designed to endow them with a
sanctity such as the Missouri Compromise had come to have and
which Douglas well knew the Missouri Compromise had not had
until long after 1821.

In the judgment of your committee [the report continues],
those measures were intended to have a far more compre-
hensive and enduring effect than the mere adjustment of the

KEPEAJL OF THE MISSOUBI COMPROMISE IH 155

difficulties arising out of the recent acquisition of Mexican
territory. They were designed to establish certain great prin-
ciples, which would not only furnish adequate remedies for
existing evils, but, in all time to come, avoid the perils of a
similar agitation, by withdrawing the question of slavery from
the halls of Congress and the political arena, and committing
it to the arbitrament of those who were immediately inter-
ested in it, and alone responsible for its consequences. With
the view of conforming their action to what they regard the
settled policy of the government, sanctioned by the approv-
ing voice of the American people, your committee have
deemed it their duty to incorporate and perpetuate, in their
territorial bill, the principles and spirit of those measures.
If any other considerations were necessary, to render this
course imperative upon the committee, they may be found
in the fact, that the Nebraska country occupies the same
relative position to the slavery question, as did New Mexico
and Utah, when those territories were organized.

Here we find the report's first version of the popular-sovereignty
idea as the supervening principle of the 1850 compromise. But
committing slavery to tie arbitrament of those immediately
interested and alone responsible is loose enough for many mean-
ings. It certainly does not require us to believe more than that the
people of the territories would not be confronted with any federal
mandate to prohibit slavery when they came to draft constitu-
tions preparatory to seeking statehood.

We turn now to another massive difficulty: Daniel Webster
had by common consent gone to the very farthest verge that
free-soil opinion could go in conciliating pro-slavery opinion in
1850. Indeed, it is probable that no other northern leader had the
prestige to go so far, and Webster himself had spent that prestige
prodigally. But Webster had said in 1850, in one passage of the
March 7 speech, that "there is not at this moment within the
United States, or any territory of the United States, a single foot
of land, the character of which, in regard to its being free terri-
tory, or slave territory, is not fixed by some law, and some
irrepealable law, beyond the power of the action of the govern-
ment" If this was so, or if the belief that it was so had been part
of the purchase price of support by the North for the 1850
legislation, for what territory could that legislation serve as

156 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

precedent? Indeed, was it not the conviction, in 1850, that the
compromise measures were a final settlement of the question of
slavery in the territories, that induced men on all sides to make
concessions? For the belief that the relaxation of a principle will
never serve as a precedent, that therefore such evil as flows from
the case will be limited to the case, is the very thing that will
induce men to relax their principles.

But what did Webster mean by "inrepealable law"? After
Douglas had been driven to the repeal of the Missouri slavery
restriction, when he was locked in combat with the free-soil
senators over his amended Kansas-Nebraska bill, Douglas asserted
that Webster (now dead) did wi include the Missouri Com-
promise in that category, and cited as evidence another passage
from Webster's March 7 speech:

Now, Mr. President, I have established ... the proposition
with which I set out . . . and that is, that the whole territory
within the former United States, or in the newly acquired
Mexican provinces, has a fixed and settled character, now
fixed and settled by law which cannot be repealed; in the
case of Texas without a violation of public faith, and by no
human power in regard to California or New Mexico; that,
therefore, under one or other of these laws, every foot of
land in the States or in the Territories has already received
a fixed and decided character.

"One or other of these laws," Douglas was to insist, distinctly
referred only to laws affecting Texas and the Mexican provinces,
and these and these alone were "irrepealable." But what Douglas
did not mention was that Webster had also said, in the very
paragraph preceding the foregoing, that "wherever there is a foot
of land to be prevented from becoming skve territory, I am ready
to assert the principle of the exclusion of slavery." 10 And when
Webster on June 3, 1850, voted for the provisions of the 1850 bills
permitting the people of the new territories to adopt state con-
stitutions with or without slavery, he said: "And let it be remem-
bered that I am now speaking of New Mexico and Utah, and
other territories acquired from Mexico, and of nothing else . . .
as to them [our italics] I say that I see no occasion to make
a provision against slavery . . ," 11 Nothing can be more certain
than that Webster never understood the Missouri restriction to
have been disturbed by 1850; and Douglas was certainly guilty

BEPEAL OP THE MISSOTBI COMPROMISE HI 157

of disingenuousness in twisting the one sentence to Ms purpose.
Our defense of Douglas on this point is the one already sug-
gested; he no more intended repeal than Webster did, and was
driven to such tortuous explanations by the same unforeseen
contingency that drove him to repeal.

To the objection, however, that the very idea of the Compro-
mise of 1850 was founded upon the belief that it could not serve
as a precedent, we offer a twofold reply. In the first place, one
virtue of the 1850 compromise, as Douglas expounded it, was
that it permitted the different parties to accept it for different,
even contradictory, reasons. Thus Webster might reconcile im-
portant elements of free-soil opinion on the assumption that there
would be no further territorial acquisitions; that was his privilege
as a northeastern Whig. But by the same token Douglas, as a
northwestern Democrat, had a right to different expectations.

Yet this explanation is not sufficient. However notoriously alive
Manifest Destiny may have yet been in the Democratic party in
1850, the idea that the compromisers were establishing a prece-
dent for "all time to come" was certainly remote from public
consciousness. Indeed, it is virtually certain that, if there had
been any serious attempt to introduce such a consideration into
the compromising, compromise would have been at an end. Yet
tow "unhistoricaT is this use of history? Lincoln was one day to
write; "AH honor to Jefferson to the man who, in the concrete
pressure of a straggle for national independence by a single
people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into
a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable
to all men and all times, and so to embklm it there, that today,
and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling
block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and op-
pression." 12 Yet Lincoln knew that the anti-slavery implications
that he, in 1858, perceived in the Declaration were far from fully
grasped by the public for whom Jefferson wrote. It was notorious
that the Declaration itself had been emended more than once
out of tenderness for the sensibilities of those who profited North
and South by the slave trade, whether as buyers or sellers. If the
Declaration of Independence meant no more than what it was
generally understood to mean in 1776, Lincoln's statement is
profoundly unhistorical. Yet had not Jefferson himself said of the
Declaration that it was only meant ". . . to be an expression of
the American mind . , , [and that] All its authority rests on the

158 'SHE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

hamonMng sentiments of the day"? 18 Jefferson, in writing the
Declaration, may have expressed no more than what he -thought
all believed- But it is also true that men in 1776 subscribed to
propositions which had consequences of which they were not fully
aware and which they may not have accepted if they had been
aware of them. That Jefferson intended the Declaration, or
the philosophy it expressed, to have far more drastic consequences
than were possible in 1776 is hardly open to question. And if
the intention of the legislator is the law, then did not the historical
meaning of the Declaration comprehend also its historic mission,
and was not that mission the attainment as well as the promise
of equality?

Applying the same construction to Douglas's interpretation of
the Compromise of 1850, may we not say that he, as one of the
chief architects of that legislation, had a right to find in it more
than was unequivocally expressed, more even than was generally
understood as a condition of its acceptance at the time it was
accepted? In our judgment, such a ^constructive interpretation 7 *
of the past would have been unjustifiable if Douglas's present
intention was not justifiable. In so far as that intention was repeal
of the Missouri Compromise, which we deny that it was, he should
be condemned. But in so far as his aim was propaganda in behalf
of 1850, which we affirm, witih a view to lend dignity to those
measures so that support of them would not be a Mss of death
to national political parties, his aim is eminently justifiable. And
essential to that propaganda was the discovery that 1850 was not
merely the rubbish heap for the principles of frightened men but
the rallying ground for a better principle.

Let us now hear how Nebraska country in 1854 occupied the
"same relative position*' as Utah and New Mexico in 1850.

It was a disputed point, whether slavery was prohibited by
law in tihte country acquired from Mexico. On the one hand
it was contended, as a legal proposition, that slavery having
been prohibited by the enactments of Mexico, according to
the laws of nations, we received the country with all its local
laws and domestic institutions attached to the soil, so far as
they did not conflict with the Constitution of the United
States; and that a law, either protecting or prohibiting slav-
ery, was not repugnant to that instrument, as was evidenced

BEPEAI* OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE m 159

by the fact, that one-half of the States of the Union tolerated,
while the other half prohibited, the institution of Slavery.
On the other hand it was insisted that, by virtue of the
Constitution of the United States, every citizen had a right
to remove to any Tenitory of the Union, and carry his
property with him under the protection of law, whether that
property consisted in persons or things. The difficulties arising
from this diversity of opinion were greatly aggravated by
the fact^ that there were many persons on both sides of the
legal controversy who were unwilling to abide the decision
of the courts on the legal matters in dispute; thus, among
those who claimed that the Mexican laws were still in force,
and consequently that slavery was already prohibited in
those territories by valid enactment, there were many who
insisted upon Congress making the matter certain, by enact-
ing another prohibition. In like manner, some of those who
argued that the Mexican laws had ceased to have any binding
force, and that the Constitution tolerated and protected slave
property in those territories, were unwilling to trust the
decision of the courts upon that point, and insisted that
Congress should, by direct enactment remove aE legal obsta-
cles to the introduction of slaves into those territories. [Jef-
ferson Davis in 1850 only wished to prevent a territorial
legislature from prohibiting the introduction of slavery. He
had not yet moved to the demand for full congressional
protection.]

Such being the character of the controversy, in respect
to the territory acquired from Mexico, a similar question has
arisen in regard to the right to hold slaves in the proposed
territory of Nebraska when the Indian laws shall be with-
drawn * . Under this section [of the 1820 enabling act for
Missouri], as in the case of Mexican kw in New Mexico
and Utah, it is a disputed point whether slavery is prohibited
in Nebraska country by valid enactment The decision of
this question involves the constitutional power of Congress
to pass laws prescribing and regulating the domestic institu-
tions of the various territories of the Union. In the opinion
of those eminent statesmen, who hold that Congress is in-
vested with no rightful authority to legislate upon the subject
of slavery in the teacritories, the eighth section of the act
preparatory to the admission of Missouri is null and void;

160 THE CASE FOE DOUGLAS

while the prevailing sentiment in large portions of the Union
sustains the doctrine that the Constitution of the United
States secures to every citizen an inalienable right to move
into any of the territories with his property, of whatever kind
and description, and to hold and enjoy the same under the
sanction of law.

Let us watch the political legerdemain whereby Douglas extracts
a new principle from an old event. Notice the last sentence
quoted, in which Douglas describes one doctrine (and only one)
as being held by eminent statesmen. According to this doctrine,
the Missouri Compromise was null and void because Congress
had no rightful power whatever to legislate upon the question of
slavery in the territories. The opinion of the "eminent statesmen"
is presented as an objection to the Missouri law, but there is
nothing analogous to it in the preceding paragraph, wherein ob-
jections to the Mexican anti-slavery law were presented. Certainly
it could not refer to Douglas's 1850 opinions, for we have heard
Douglas's well-known 1850 advocacy of the legal effectiveness of
the Mexican prohibition as the strongest reason why he had
opposed the Wilmot Proviso. And no Mexican kw could have
been legally effective which the Constitution had denied Congress
the power to enact. Now, in the first of the two paragraphs just
quoted, Douglas gave as the basis of the argument of those who
had opposed the legal proposition in favor of Mexican law that
"by virtue of the Constitution of the United States, every citizen
had a right to remove to any Territory of the Union, and carry his
property with him under the protection of law, whether that
property consisted in persons or things." In the latter paragraph
he repeats this doctrine, in the second half of the last sentence
quoted, after the semicolon. But the manner in which it is re-
peated, within the same sentence as the one quoting the opinion
of "eminent statesmen/* obscures the fact that the doctrine that
Congress has no power to legislate on slavery in the territories is
completely different from the doctrine that every citizen has an
inalienable right to move into any territory with any description
of property. For the latter doctrine, by necessary inference, con-
veys to Congress the right to pass laws protecting the slave
property to which the citizen is said to have an inalienable right
Both doctrines support the view tibat the Missouri Compromise
was invalid, but one is the old Calhoun-Davis doctrine, whose

BEPEAI* OF THE MISS0UBI COMPROMISE HI l6l

culmination was the demand for a congressional slave code for
the territories; and the other was Douglas's subsequent doctrine
of complete non-interference, a doctrine maintained in the de-
bates with Lincoln and given full form only in the H&fpefo
Magazine article, "Popular Sovereignly in the Territories," pub-
lished in 1859.

But if this is "pure" popular sovereignty, and if this is expressly
stated to imply the invalidity of the Missouri restriction, do we
not here have an unmistakable sign that repeal was Douglas's aim
from the outset in 1854? The answer is no. For Douglas had
not yet identified himself with "pure" popular sovereignty. That
Douglas was preparing the ground for such a declaration of
invalidity, we have no doubt But preparing is not occupying,
Everything hinges on timing. To declare the invalidity of the
Missouri law after all the territory north of the Missouri line had
been organized and settled would be very different from doing so
earlier.

But who were the "eminent statesmen"? There is something
"funny" in this expression, in both senses of the colloquialism.
While we would not positively assert that there were no such
persons, it would be difficult to say who they were. Certainly
neither Douglas nor any of the other compromisers held such
views in 1850 a fact attested by the omission of any such ob-
jection to the Mexican law in this very report Popular sovereignty
had been common political coin at least since 1848, and yet no
one had said that Congress had no power over slavery in the
territories. As a political doctrine, it was widely believed that
the people of the territories ought to be accorded the fullest
measure of self-government; but the general legal doctrine still
held that it was the right and duty of Congress to accord this
measure, and not that the Constitution did it of its own force.
The 1850 territorial law not only provided for a governor and
judges appointed by the President of the United States and a
veto power (which required a two-thirds vote of the territorial
legislature to override) by this same governor (who was not
responsible to the territories but to the President), but every
territorial statute was subject to an absolute veto by Congress.
Even in the final version of the Kansas-Nebraska Act which
supposedly embodied more of this new "pure" popular sover-
eignty, the non-responsible executive and his veto remained.

Even if we confound the political desirability, with the legal

l62 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

requirement, of a hands-off policy by Congress concerning slavery
in the territories, no one had yet (January 4, 1854) maintained
even the desirability that congressional hands should be off to
the extent now indicated. At the most, popular sovereignty had
meant that Congress should not decide, even in the territorial
period, whether slavery might be established in a territory. But
that Congress had no power over the conditions under which
the people who went into the territories might decide e.g.,
whether they went with or tvithout slaves had not been a recog-
nized feature of popular sovereignty. Those who held that Con-
gress had no such power the Calhoun-Davis school also held
fiie whole idea of popular sovereignty in contempt. Douglas thus
transforms the contemporaneous 1854 "dispute" (a dispute that
was sleeping, if not moribund, until his report gave it vitality)
concerning the validity of the Missouri law by introducing a doc-
trine which has no equivalent in the supposed analogy. And the
boldness of Douglas's originality is concealed when he endows
this new doctrine with the prestige of "eminent" statesmen who,
so far as we know, existed only in his imagination.

Final judgment on this comparison of Nebraska and the
Mexican acquisition can be arrived at only after evaluating
Douglas's intention; but the manner in which Douglas makes
the comparison reveals a further downgrading of the Missouri
Compromise. That there were objections by the Calhoun-Davis
school to both the Mexican and Missouri slavery restrictions is
certainly correct, and it is also true that at bottom they were
founded upon a single constitutional doctrine. This was given its
final and precise formulation in 1857 in Taney's opinion in the
Dred Scott case: that the right to property in a slave was
affirmed in the Constitution, and that the Constitution (by the
Fifth Amendment) forbade Congress (and, a fortiori, Mexican
law) to deprive any person of property without due process of
law. Yet there was a great practical and political difference be-
tween Mexican law, transferred by international law to American
soil, and the at least once-sacred Missouri Compromise. The Tex-
ans had been heroes in the North as well as in the South for revolu-
tionizing against Mexican law. But even those Southerners who
believed the Missouri law unconstitutional would have recognized
in Congress an authoritative arbiter of the meaning of the Con-
stitution. 14 It was a striking departure for Douglas to put the

REPEAL OF THE MISSOUBI COMPROMISE HI 163

scruple against Mexican law, which had not been the subject of
any solemn affirmation by any branch of the American govern-
ment, upon the same level as a scruple against the Missouri
Compromise, even if the scruple in both cases had the same
technical foundation. Moreover, it was well known that the con-
stitutional objection to the Missouri Compromise had its head
and inspiration in the teachings of John Caldwell Calhoun. It was
also known that this worthy had discovered his objection only in
later years, after he had discovered the "positive good" of slavery.
When Calhoun sat in Monroe's Cabinet and was among those con-
sulted on the constitutionality of the famous eighth section of the
enabling act for Missouri he found no flaw in it. Indeed, he then
"heartily endorsed" the Compromise of 1820, according to an
authoritative recent study. 15 The Missouri Compromise had been
passed by both houses of Congress and signed by a president.
And this President, who was subsequently re-elected, had re-
ceived the approval by his Cabinet of the eighth section, a Cabinet
including both Calhoun and John Quincy Adams. Disrespect to
Mexican law could hardly outrage the North. Disrespect to the
Missouri Compromise assuredly would. Douglas, of course, had
said in 1850 that American settlers cared nothing for congressional
legislation of their domestic affairs unless it suited them. However,
in the old Northwest and in Iowa and Minnesota, it was indisputa-
ble that the settlers had decided in accordance with the federal
declaration. Whether federal law there was powerless or not, it
derived dignity from the fact that it had never been seriously
challenged.

But the downgrading of the Missouri Compromise goes still
farther. In discussing the Mexican prohibition of slavery Douglas
cites the opinion which he himself once expressed with utmost
emphasis holding that it was valid on American soil until re-
pealed by American authority. But when he comes to the
"disputed point" concerning the Missouri Compromise restriction
of slavery, he gives two opinions holding this law invalid the new
"pure" popular-sovereignty opinion, and the Calhoun-Davis opin-
ion, repeated from the preceding paragraph but no opinion
supporting the Missouri law's validity. It is of particular impor-
tance in this context to realize that among extreme anti-slavery
men it was firmly believed that the provision in the Fifth
Amendment forbidding any person to be deprived of life, liberty,
or property, without due process of law, forbade that any man

164 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

be enslaved in consequence of federal law. By omitting this
challenging antithesis to "the doctrine that the Constitution of the
United States secures to every citizen an inalienable right to move
into any of the territories with his property, of whatever kind and
description," he clothes that doctrine with excessive dignity.
Certainly he treats this view with a consideration that is a surprise
to anyone who has witnessed the savage attacks he made upon
ft in 1850. And the omitted doctrine was the one held most
vehemently by Chase and Sumner, the men who were presently
to issue a flaming challenge to the Nebraska bill. Whether or not
this was a tactical error, Douglas was to pay heavily for it. Did
Douglas think that, by not presenting any other doctrine antitheti-
cal to the extreme pro-slavery position, this new "pure" popular
sovereignty might be construed to be such an antithesis? Did he,
in 1854, visualize "pure" popular sovereignty as the fighting free-
soil doctrine it became for a short time in the fight against
Lecompton?

We now come to the first specific statement of what Douglas's
committee proposed that Congress actually do. Until now we
were told only that it meant to follow the precedent of 1850 and
then were presented with a complicated statement concerning the
nature of the precedent, in the form of an analogy between the
dispute in 1850 over Utah and New Mexico and the "dispute"
in 1854 over Nebraska, and its relation to current questions. The
analogy suggested a heavy weighting of the scales against the
Missouri Compromise. But the weight is more than redressed by
a downright denial of the force of the deleterious inferences.
Douglas wrote:

Your committee do not feel themselves called upon to enter
into the discussion of these controverted questions. They
involve the same grave issues which produced the agitation,
the sectional strife, and the fearful struggle of 1850. As
Congress deemed it wise and prudent to refrain from de-
ciding the matters in controversy then, either by affirming or
repealing the Mexican laws, or by any act declaratory of the
true intent of the Constitution and the extent of the protec-
tion afforded by it to slave property in the territories, so your
committee are not prepared now to recommend a departure
from the course proposed on that memorable occasion, either

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE m 165

by affirming or repealing the eighth section of the Missouri
act, or by any act declaratory of the Constitution in respect
to the legal points in dispute. [Italics not in the original]

The adverb "now" in the last sentence was soon to take on ominous
meaning. But in the context it stands in opposition to "then,"
and it would have taken an unusually wary mind to suspect that
"no V meant only "for the time being." The crucial proposition
contained in the last sentence is that the committee did not rec-
ommend the repeal of the eighth section of the Missouri act. That
it did not affirm it is of minor significance, since it was not the
custom of Congress to reaffirm the constitutionality of its own ac-
tions, and there was no demand for such an affirmation. The
refusal to reaffirm is, in itself, merely perfunctory. But the refusal
to repeal stands as massive evidence that Douglas, on January 4,
1854, had no intention that the barrier to slavery in the Nebraska
country would be thrown down as a condition of its territorial
organization.
The report then continues:

Your committee deem it fortunate for the peace of the
country, and the security of the Union, that the controversy
then resulted in the adoption of the Compromise measures,
which the two great political parties, with singular unanimity,
have affirmed as a cardinal article of their faith, and pro-
claimed to the world, as a final settlement of the controversy
and an end of the agitation. A due respect, therefore, for the
avowed opinions of Senators, as well as a proper sense of
patriotic duty, enjoins upon your committee the propriety
and necessity of a strict adherence to the principles, and even
a literal adoption of the enactments of that adjustment in all
their territorial bills, so far as the same are not locally
inapplicable.

Having climbed to the clarity of an unequivocal refusal to repeal,
Douglas again descends to the murky ambiguities of his 1850
precedent. If he had limited himself to the literal adoption . . .
so far as the same are not locally inapplicable" of the language
of the 1850 territorial acts, then the only important question
could have been whether the right granted in the 1850 laws to
apply for admission with slavery was or was not locally inappli-
cable" in the face of the eighth section of the Missouri act But

l66 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

this would have been hardly worth quarreling about. In the joint
debates, Lincoln conceded this right to the people of any territory,
provided slavery had been excluded during the territorial period.
For, as we have often noted, all it meant was conceding to them
the right to do, the day before statehood, what they could in any
event do the day after. But now after maintaining that in 1850
Congress had refused to decide all such questions of principle as
whether the Constitution of the United States made freedom
national and slavery an exception, or slavery national and freedom
an exception, or that the Constitution reserved the question of
freedom versus slavery to localities because Congress had no
power over it whatever now Douglas insists upon following the
example of 1850, not only in the letter of the law, but in its
"principles" as well. And the denouement of that fateful January
of 1854 which we shall describe in the next chapter began, not
with the report we are now reading, but with the subsequent
inclusion into the Nebraska bill of an alleged "principle" of 1850,
as if it had been "a literal adoption" from the 1850 territorial laws.
Let us now hear Douglas report the 'letter" of the earlier laws:

Those enactments embrace, among other things less material
to the matters under consideration, the following provisions:

"When admitted as a State, the said Territory or any portion
of the same, shall be received into the Union, with or without
slavery, as their constitution may prescribe at the time of
their admission."

"That the legislative power and authority of said Territory
shall be vested in the governor and a legislative assembly."

"That the legislative power of said Territory shall extend to
all rightful subjects of legislation, consistent with the Con-
stitution of the United States and the provisions of this
act . . . [We omit repeating a clause dealing with disposi-
tion of the soil and discriminatory taxes.]

"Writs of error and appeal from the final decisions of said
[territorial] supreme court shall be allowed, and may be
taken to the Supreme Court of the United States in the same
manner and under the same regulations as from the circuit
courts of the United States . . . except only that, in all cases
involving title to slaves, the said writs of error or appeals

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE m l6/

shall be allowed and decided by the said supreme court with-
out regard to the value of the matter, property, or title in
controversy; and except, also, that a writ of error or appeal
shall also be allowed to the Supreme Court of the United
States . . . upon any writ of habeas corpus involving the
question of personal freedom . . ."

Then, after a short paragraph citing the extension of the 1850
Fugitive Slave Law to the new territories in 1850, Douglas goes
on to enunciate the "principles" (otherwise called "propositions")
of the 1850 territorial laws.

From these provisions it is apparent that the compromise
measures of 1850 affirm and rest upon the following proposi-
tions.

First: That all questions pertaining to slavery in the terri-
tories, and in the new States to be formed therefrom, are
to be left to the decision of the people residing therein, by
their appropriate representatives, to be chosen by them for
that purpose.

Second: That "all cases involving title to slaves," and
"questions of personal freedom" are referred to the adjudica-
tion of the local tribunals, with the right of appeal to the
Supreme Court of the United States.

Third: That the provisions of the Constitution of the
United States, in respect to fugitives from service, are to be
carried into faithful execution in all "organized territories" the
same as in the States.

This famous document then ends as follows:

The substitute for the bill which your committee have pre-
pared, and which is commended to the favorable action of
the Senate, proposes to carry these propositions and princi-
ples into practical operation, in the precise language of the
compromise measures of 1850.

Let us observe the same kind of transformation flowing from the
juxtaposition of the provisions of the 1850 territorial acts with
propositions (or "principles") upon which they are said to rest,
as we previously noted in the juxtaposition (and presumed anal-
ogy) of the dispute concerning the validity of the Mexican anti-
slavery law and the dispute concerning the validity of the

l68 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

Missouri restriction. Now the first provision cited by Douglas ac-
tually says nothing whatever concerning the power of the people
of the territories over slavery in the territories; it says only that
when admitted as a state said territory (or any portion of the
same) shall be received into the Union with or without slavery.
This provision neither precludes nor assumes the existence of slav-
ery as a subject of territorial legislation, for the simple reason that
it does not hold the question of slavery during the territorial
period in contemplation at all. The first proposition then makes a
giant and wholly unwarranted leap (from the point of view of
logical inference) when it says that att questions in the territories
are to be decided by representatives of the people of the territo-
ries. This proposition, incidentally, even if the compromise meas-
ures of 1850 had in some unseen way "rested upon" it, certainly is
nowhere "affirmed" in them. However, as an alleged inference
from the first provision cited, we must say that the first proposition
states the exact reverse of the truth: i.e., by itself the first
provision refers no question pertaining to slavery in a territory to
the decision of the people therein.

But could the first proposition be inferred from the third
provision (of the 1850 territorial laws) cited in Douglas's report
or from some combination of the first and third provisions? The
answer is that it could not be, by any process of construction we
know. On Douglas's own showing, in this very report, Congress
did not decide or declare what degree or kind of power over
questions pertaining to slavery "in the territories" was "consistent
with the Constitution of the United States." And Congress had
not, in 1850, left it to the territorial governments or to the people
of the territories acting in a constituent capacity to judge the ex-
tent of their own powers under the Constitution. This is shown
by the fact that "all cases involving title to slaves" and "questions
of personal freedom" were left to decisions of the courts and
ultimately to the Supreme Court of the United States. And these
courts, whether territorial or federal, were neither chosen by nor
responsible in any way to the people of the territories. It is clear
that the aforesaid "cases" and "questions" would surely have in-
volved some or all of the points of controversy which Douglas
praised Congress for not deciding in 1850. If, for example, the
Dred Scott decision had issued before January 1854, it would
have been plain, in accordance with that decision, that all ques-
tions pertaining to slavery had not been left to the people of Utah

REPEAL OF THE MISSOUKI COMPKOMISE m 169

and New Mexico or to their representatives and could not be left
to them or to the people of Nebraska because according to the
Dred Scott decision neither Congress nor a territorial legislature
had any power consistent with the Constitution to forbid the
introduction of slaves into any United States territory. In citing
the Calhoun-Davis opinion that every citizen of the United States
had an inalienable right to go into any federal territory with his
slave property, Douglas had by clear implication raised the
hypothetical possibility of such a Supreme Court decision as that
in the case of Dred Scott. Hence he must have known on January
4, 1854, that the first of his "propositions," according to which
"all questions pertaining to slavery in the territories . . . [were]
to be left to the people residing therein," might not have involved
any legislative power to forbid the bringing of slaves into these
selfsame territories. In short, as long as there was no understand-
ing of what powers over slavery in the territories were "consistent
with the Constitution of the United States," it was impossible to
deduce from the 1850 grant to the people of Utah and New
Mexico of legislative power in "all rightful subjects of legislation"
any power to decide "all questions pertaining to slavery in the
territories."

What Douglas has done, and in our opinion done quite
deliberately, is to create, by his first proposition, a vastly greater
presumption in favor of a much "purer" popular sovereignty than
had ever been made before. Because Congress left vital constitu-
tional points undecided, Douglas in his first proposition presumes
that it left them, not to the Supreme Court, but to the people of
the territories to decide. Because Congress left it to the people
to decide the status of slavery after the territorial period ended,
Douglas presumes that it had also left it to them to decide it
before it ended. Yet there is a tactical and rhetorical, if not logical,
consistency in all this: Douglas steadily pushes forward the whole
popular-sovereignty idea as a kind of residual legatee of all
the mutually incompatible contending doctrines. Popular sover-
eignty emerges as a kind of dark horse as the popular favorites
kill each other off.

But further: Douglas had found, and found truly, that the
genius of the 1850 compromise lay in a practical agreement which
admitted of divergent and even contradictory interpretations; but
the January 4, 1854, Nebraska bill, as authoritatively expounded
by its author, does not rest simply on the first or "pure" popular-

THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

sovereignty "proposition"; it rests also on the second, which, if it
does not flatly contradict the first, renders it altogether obscure.
By this peculiar rhetoricwhich permits the same kind of diver-
gent interpretations as persisted after 1850 Douglas is true to
the "principle*' of 1850.

Two things, and only two things, emerge clearly as immediate
political conclusions of the report: It is the hope and intention
of its author that all questions pertaining to slavery will be left
or will be believed to be left to the decision of the people residing
in the territories; and second, that the Missouri Compromise is
not repealed.

Chapter VIII

The Repeal of the Missouri
Compromise IV

TRAGEDY. THE EXTREMES CRUSH THE MEAN

Now intervened a strange episode. Douglas's special report,
accompanied by the bill, was issued on January 4 and printed
in the Washington Sentinel on the seventh. This bill, despite the
elaborate prologue of the report, actually contained no statement
regarding slavery, except the language of the 1850 territorial acts
which we have seen as the first of the provisions cited in the
report. But on January 10, after the bill had been twice read in
the Senate and ordered to be printed, it was reprinted by the
Sentinel with an additional twenty-first section which, Douglas
explained, had been omitted in the first published version because
of a "clerical error." This famed "clerical error" section read as
follows:

Section 21. And be it further enacted, That, in order to
avoid all misconstruction, it is hereby declared to be the true
intent and meaning of this act, so far as the question of slavery
is concerned, to carry into practical operation the following
propositions and principles established by the compromise
measures of 1850, to wit:

First. That all questions pertaining to slavery in the
Territories, and in the new States to be formed therefrom,
are to be left to the decision of the people residing therein,
through their appropriate representatives.

Second. That "all cases involving title to slaves" and
"questions of personal freedom/' are referred to the adjudica-

THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

tion of the local tribunals, with the right of appeal to the
Supreme Court of the United States.

Third. That the provisions of the Constitution and laws of
the United States, in respect to fugitives from service, are
to be carried into faithful execution in all "the organized
Territories" the same as in the States.

It will be seen immediately that these three "propositions and
principles" correspond to the ones with which the report had con-
cluded. But whereas the second and third propositions of the
report and of the twenty-first section are virtually identical, there
is a slight change in the initial proposition as it occurs in the bill.
The report spoke of the "decision of the people ... by their ap-
propriate representatives, to be chosen by them for that purpose"
The final portion of this sentence is now dropped. Why? The idea
of representatives chosen for a special purpose suggests a consti-
tutional convention, an exertion of constituent or original power,
and not power delegated by Congress. This clause is the nexus
in the report between the first provision and the first proposition.
Both suggest (without specifying) the exercise of an extraordi-
nary power, and not the legislative power vested in a territorial
governor and legislative assembly. However, the first proposition
of the twenty-first section does retain a vestige of its predecessor
in the word "appropriate." All this makes it difficult to believe
that Douglas did not have the twenty-first section as part of his
grand design on January 4, and still more difficult to believe that
a clerk was responsible for its omission on that date. Certainly
the metamorphosis of the first provision into the first proposition
in the report, and the latter into the first proposition of the twenty-
first section, shows a steady progress of the idea of popular sover-
eignty, as applied to questions pertaining to slavery, from an
extraordinary power exerted on the threshold of statehood, to an
extraordinary power exerted during the territorial period, to an
almost ordinary exertion of territorial legislative power. Yet the
"almost" is an important reservation. For the word "appropriate"
is an anomaly. And the second proposition raises as massive a
question mark as to the meaning of the first proposition, when it
occurs in the twenty-first section of the bill, as it raised in the
report

A succession of historical authorities, following the main theme
of The Appeal of the Independent Democrats, has accepted the

REPEAL, OF THE MISSOUBI COMPROMISE IV 173

view that the twenty-first section of Douglas's Nebraska bill, as
reprinted on January 10, 1854, represented a complete and
radical departure. In the words of Allan Nevins, "it enacted the
popular sovereignty principle. The plain implication was that the
Missouri Compromise was dead." 1 But in the face of the question
mark with which we have just seen Douglas himself punctuate
"the popular sovereignty principle," is it not impossible thus to
assert what effect its enactment, if it was enacted, would have
had on existing law? So far as anyone could tell, on the basis of
Douglas's report or bill, including the twenty-first section, popular
sovereignty was protean and might assume almost any shape or
form. Indeed, there was no plain implication in the entire bill and
report. It was a mass of contrary and contradictory statements,
inferences, and implications. In the face of the many eminent
scholars who speak with the voice of Professor Nevins, we
summon as a single witness Abraham Lincoln. The following
passages are from the Peoria speech (October 16, 1854):

On January 4, 1854, Judge Douglas introduces a new bill to
give Nebraska territorial government. He accompanies this
bill with a report, in which last, he expressly recommends
that the Missouri Compromise shall neither be affirmed nor
repealed.

Before long the bill is so modified as to make two territories
instead of one; calling the southern one Kansas.

Also, about a month after the introduction of the bill, on
the Judge's own motion, it is so amended as to declare the
Missouri Compromise inoperative and void . . . 2

It will be noted that Lincoln's expression "about a month" implies
that he drew no distinction between the January 4 and January 10
versions of the first Douglas bill. The decisive fact concerning the
first bill, with or without the twenty-first section, was that it
expressly did not affirm or repeal the eighth section of the Missouri
law. If there was any doubt that Lincoln had brushed aside the
twenty-first section of the first bill, it should be removed by this:

I am aware Judge Douglas now argues that the subsequent
express repeal [italics ours, not Lincoln's] is no substantial
alteration of the bill. This argument seems wonderful to me.
It is as if one should argue that white and black are not
different 8

174 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

The difference between white and black, to Lincoln, was the
difference between the bill before and after express repeal. As
far as Lincoln was concerned, to pretend, as Douglas did, that
the bill, even with the twenty-first section, was not essentially and
fundamentally different from the bill with express repeal was as
"wonderful ... as if one should argue that white and black are
not different" But this judgment of Lincoln, sufficient, as we think,
to refute the idea of any "plain implication" that the Missouri
Compromise was to be killed by the twenty-first section, has other
far-reaching implications. For Lincoln's statement, crucial as it is
to his case against Douglas, raises the question of the validity of
the whole outcry raised against Douglas's report and bill before
the express repeal. And with it is involved the question of whether
Douglas really bore the responsibility of the repeal when it finally
came. We must now observe the sequence of events in which that
express repeal was involved.

Despite the fact that the bill Douglas reported on January 4
contained nothing more revolutionary than the provision for
admitting future states from Nebraska with or without slavery,
it was immediately attacked by Greeley in the New York
Tribune, and the hue and cry in the North began. Nothing better
illustrates the volatility of the political left wing of the anti-slavery
movement than the hare-and-tortoise relationship of Greeley and
Lincoln. Greeley exploded at the first appearance of a suggestion
of a challenge to the Missouri Compromise, despite the disclaimer
in the report Lincoln would not be moved to action by an insult
not at the same time certain to be an injury. The gauntlet had
to be thrown down in terms altogether unmistakable before he
would assume the vast responsibility of joining such an issue. But
once the issue was joined, Lincoln never rested in carrying on
the fight. It was Greeley who flinched in 1858 and sought accom-
modation with Douglas, even as he was later to flinch when
the election of Lincoln was seen to involve war or disunion. But
the brilliant and unstable editor, as the war progressed, was to
harry Lincoln again, demanding a radical abolition policy which
would have been a fundamental departure from the platform
upon which Lincoln had been elected and which he had re-
affirmed in his first inaugural address. Now in 1854 Greeley set
the deep-toned chords vibrating in the North, and there was an
answering cacophony from the opposite direction. "Clay's Whig

REPEAL OF THE MISSOUBI COMPROMISE IV 175

successor in the Senate, Archibald Dixon, a ... lawyer-planter
of precise mind," writes Professor Nevins, "pointed out the flaw"
in the twenty-first section. "Unless the Missouri Compromise
restriction were explicitly repealed, it would remain in force until
the people had acted to end it. No slaveholder could emigrate
to the Territory with slaves until after the people living therein
had met, and through their representatives passed affirmatively
on the question whether slavery could exist or not. This being
so, argued Dixon, the decision would certainly go against slavery;
for the laws up to that point would exclude all slaveholders while
admitting free-soilers, abolitionists, Britons, Germans, and others
opposed to the peculiar institution/' 4 According to Mrs. Dixon,
in her True History of the Missouri Compromise and Its Repeal,
her husband

saw that Judge Douglas's bill, though seemingly framed on
the plan of non-intervention, would not in reality carry out
that principle at all; that as far as practical participation of
the Southern people in those territories was concerned, the
Wilmot Proviso . . . could not more effectually exclude them
than they were already excluded by the Act of 1820 . . .
and, until it should be directly repealed, it would effectually
and practically preclude the Southern people from settling
in Kansas and Nebraska ... If they were effectually, even
though indirectly, excluded from entering these Territories,
what good would it do them that there was in the twenty-
first section a provision that "all questions pertaining to
slavery in the Territories and New States to be formed
therefrom are to be left to the decision of the people residing
therein, through their appropriate representatives?" Cui
bono? When they were to be no part of the people.

We can think of no more accurate statement of the force oi
Douglas's first Nebraska bill, even with the twenty-first section
nor more eloquent testimony in support of our thesis that Douglas
never intended that the Missouri slavery restriction would, "prac-
tically and effectually," be repealed. Nor, in our view, was i1
repealed by unequivocal indirection. This Douglas might have
done by presenting the twenty-first section as an amendment tc
the January 4 bill. Then it might have "superseded" any contrary
implications in the original version. But by presenting the twenty-
first section as a part of the original version, he presented it as

176 1HE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

part of a bill of which the special report stood as an authoritative
explanation. And this report, to repeat, expressly denied an
intention to repeal. Lincoln, as we have seen, wisely disregarded
the whole business of "clerical error," as The Appeal of the
Independent Democrats unwisely did not do. As long as Douglas's
denial of an intention to repeal was uncontradicted by Douglas
himself, it rendered nugatory any repeal implication of the
twenty-first section. At this juncture the anti-slavery leaders
should have been content to take their stand on this denial and
keep their powder dry.

Alas, extremists on both sides were unwilling to await the
unraveling of the mysteries Douglas had propounded. Douglas
hoped that while each extreme would find something doctrinal
with which to be appeased, if not satisfied, the loaves and fishes
of new territorial governments might "supersede" such doctrinal
appetites as were disappointed. The probability that Nebraska
would quicldy yield several new free states should have satisfied
the free-soilers. Meanwhile, the doctrine of the special report,
steadily and progressively interpreted in favor of an ever "purer"
popular sovereignty, would render it morally certain that in any
future territorial acquisitions there would be no federal prohibi-
tion of slavery. And it was toward such acquisitions that Douglas
would have turned the nation's energies.

On January 16, Dixon informed the Senate of his intention to
offer an amendment to the Nebraska bill that would in express
terms have removed the slavery restriction of the eighth section
of the Missouri act and have affirmed

that the citizens of the several States or Territories shall be
at liberty to take and hold their slaves within any of the
Territories of the United States, or of the States to be formed
therefrom, as if the said act . . . had never been passed.

This amendment, according to all accounts, amazed and agitated
Douglas. And well it might. Far from being a mere repeal, it was
virtually a statement of the extreme Calhoun-Davis position. For
the expression "take and hold 9 their slaves implied that territorial
enactments might not forbid slaveholding. And the reference to
future states as well as territories made the amendment a kind
of reverse Wilmot Proviso. Of course there was an equivocation
in "as if the said act ... had never been passed"; yet "shall be

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE IV 177

at liberty" was strong medicine. No doubt Dixon expressed a more
extreme position here than he meant to insist upon. Later he ex-
pressed himself satisfied with Douglas's much-watered-down re-
peal provision. Yet it is instructive to see how radical the demands
of border-state senators had become; and Dixon was sitting in the
seat of Henry Clayl

Dixon's proposed amendment instantly rallied the pro-slavery
forces. If a Whig would do so much for the South, could Demo-
crats do less? The next few days were thick with secret confer-
ences, from which fateful decisions were to emerge. That a crisis
no less than that of 1850 impended was foreshadowed when on
the next day, January 17, Senator Sumner arose and gave notice
of his intention to offer an amendment to the Nebraska bill ex-
pressly reaffirming the slavery prohibition of the Missouri act of
March 6, 1820. The fat was in the fire.

Sumner's initial move was more restrained than Dixon's.
Whether for bargaining purposes or not, Dixon had announced
an intention of positively establishing the legality of slavery in any
territory of the United States. Sumner might have responded by
proposing that slavery was unlawful in any territory of the
United States, but he merely stood firm on the Missouri Compro-
mise. Now did the goddess of moderation prove fickle. While
Dixon and Douglas worked together to find an acceptable com-
promise, the anti-slavery leaders in the Senate, Chase and
Sumner, took steps which made all compromise or even polite
intercourse between themselves and Douglas a virtual impossibil-
ity. They issued The Appeal of the Independent Democrats
in Congress to the People of the United States, one of the most
successful pieces of political propaganda the world has seen.
Among its resounding paragraphs were such expressions as the
following:

We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge;
as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel
of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region
immigrants from the Old World, and free laborers from our
own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism,
inhabited by masters and slaves.

And:
These pretences ... that the territory, covered by the

178 THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

positive prohibition of 1820, sustains a similar relation to
slavery with that acquired from Mexico . . . are mere inven-
tions, designed to cover up from public reprehension medi-
tated bad faith.

It concluded by imploring "Christians and Christian ministers to
interpose. Their divine religion requires them to behold in every
man a brother, and to labor for the advancement and regenera-
tion of the human race." It exhorted all men to "protest, earnestly
and emphatically . . . against this enormous crime."

The Appeal was printed, as we have noted above, in the
Congressional Globe of January 30; and the dateline then given
it by its authors was January 19. Yet the note appended to the
body of the Appeal, which we have already reproduced, inveighs
against the January 10 "clerical error"* and all subsequent changes
down to the amended version of January 23, which incorporated
Douglas's own repeal. But it is inconceivable that the original draft
of the body of the Appeal was not composed before January 10.
For it is inconceivable that the twenty-first section would not have
been flayed in the body of the Appeal if its existence was known
when the first draft of the Appeal was prepared. Precisely when
the Appeal was written we do not know. But it reached the nation
through the press on January 24. On January 23 the bill, as finally
amended in Douglas's committee, was reported to the Senate,
but consideration was postponed until the thirtieth. According to
Douglas, this was an act of courtesy to Chase, who requested the
additional week's time to study the bill as now further amended.
Clearly, however, the week's delay was to enable the Appeal to
sow the wind. This it certainly did and, when Douglas rose to
open the debate on the thirtieth, the whirlwind raged about him.

Douglas claimed to know nothing about the Appeal until after
it had been published. Exactly when he found out about it, when
therefore he knew that Chase and Sumner were not interested
in any form or shape of compromise with him, is less important
than the brute fact that they applied the torch to anti-slavery
passions at the precise moment when bargaining among the
senators was going on as to the form that a Nebraska bill might
take. Chase, who was the principal author of the Appeal, had
oome to the Senate in 1849, after the 1848 elections had left the
Ohio legislature deadlocked between Whigs and Democrats and
a handful of free-soilers were able to prevent the election of either

REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE IV 179

a Whig or regular Democrat. Chase, who was above all a free-
soiler, finally went to the Senate as an "Independent Democrat."
Such a man, of course, was nothing in the national councils of
either major party. Until the principle of the Wilmot Proviso
agitation was revived and made the basis of national party
organization, he would remain a cipher. Much the same was true
of Sumner. But both men had seen, from their experience of the
Proviso, that such a party might yet take hold. Douglas's report
and bill of January 4 gave them their opportunity, and they took
it.

If Chase and Sumner had come to Douglas privately, if the
Appeal had been used as a bargaining counter with which he
might have offset the pro-slavery demands upon him, how dif-
ferent might the results have been? We can never know; but we
are convinced that Douglas would have understood as well as
Chase and Sumner the value of the weapon they held in their
hand. His remark to Dixon that he knew the repeal would raise
a "hell of a storm" suggests that he never underestimated free-soil
passions. But within the Senate at the moment, in January 1854,
the free-soil strength was negligible; and its potential influence,
instead of being mobilized to strengthen Douglas against pro-
slavery demands, was used entirely to destroy him. If Douglas
was wrong in saying later that the express repeal had not changed
the bill in any important respect, what are we to say of Chase
and Sumner, who went to the country on the basis of that earlier
nay, earliest bill? Does not Lincoln's condemnation turn back
upon his future associates as much as upon Douglas?

Certainly the Appeal burned all bridges in one direction.
Douglas was thus thrown entirely upon his southern associates if
he wanted a Nebraska bill. Should he have abandoned the effort
altogether then? Douglas was now the prisoner of his own report.
With such a weighty invocation he could hardly have turned back.
The repealers could give him the votes, the votes a bill, and the
bill two new territories. Douglas had fought the same fight against
the Wilmot Proviso men in '48, and by '49 California had come
knocking at the door for admission as a free state. Douglas had
flung this in the face of the doctrinaire exclusionists throughout
the debate in '50. He was certain he could do it again.

Did he not in fact do it again? By the spring of 1858 Kansas
seemed as surely on the way to becoming a free state as Iowa

l8o THE CASE FOR DOUGLAS

or Minnesota had been. Douglas himself had led the fight to
assure that Kansas be free under the banner of popular sover-
eignty. Were not the house divided speech and the campaign that
followed it as wanton a destruction of the spirit of compromise
and of the chances of sectional peace as Chase's and Simmer's
Appeal had been four years earlier?

Part III

THE POLITICAL

PHILOSOPHY OF

A YOUNG WHIG

Analytical Outline of Lincoln's Address before the Yotmg Men 3
Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois 9 January 27, 1838*

A. Introduction

I. Our Subject (i)

II. Our Problem: The Achievement of the Fathers; Our Duty
to Preserve and Transmit (2)

B. Dangers to Be Forestalled

I. Introduction: That They Are Internal, Not External (3, 4)

II. The Dangers and Their Remedies (5-22)

a. Present Danger: Mob Rule; and Its Remedy

1. Mob Rule (5-11)

a'. Its Direct Evils (5-8)
b'. Its Indirect Evils (9-11)

i'. From Bad Examples

2'. From Alienation of Feelings of Best Citizens

2. Remedy (12-15)

a'. Political Religion (12, 13)

b'. Redress of Grievance by Better Laws (14, 15)

b. Future Dangers to Be Anticipated

1. Introduction: Why Suppose Future Dangers? (16)

2. How Future Must Differ from the Past

a'. With Respect to Leaders of Genius and Ambi-
tion (17-19)
b'. With Respect to the Passions of the People

(20-22)
C. Exhortation to Rebuild the Temple of Liberty

I. The Materials Must Be Hewn from Reason; Passion Now
Our Enemy (23)

II. That the New Temple May Last as Long as "the Only
Greater Institution." (24)

*Note: Numbers in parenthesis correspond to the paragraphs of the
text as printed in the Sangamo Journal, February 3, 1838, and reprinted
in Collected Works, I, pp. 108-15. Tte paragraphs are not numbered
in the printed text

Chapter IX

The Teaching Concerning Political
Salvation

WE have said that Lincoln's 1838 speech "On the Perpetuation
of Our Political Institutions" showed conscious dedication to
preparation for the crisis with which he one day grappled on so
vast a scale. This may disturb the image of the folklore Lincoln,
the hero who resembles Everyman, fashioned from the clay of
the common people, sharing their joys and sorrows, yet able to
turn from the concerns of everyday life to discharge, with deeper
wisdom, duties heretofore regarded as the province of kings and
potentates. This is the Lincoln who is supposed to have written
the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope as he rode
from Washington. Yet a careful reading of the earlier deliverance
will show that the ideas crystallized in 1863, in prose not un-
worthy of the greatest master of our language, had been pondered
and matured full twenty-five years before.

Of the myriad writers on Lincoln, Edmund Wilson alone, so
far as we are aware, has grasped something of the hidden reser-
voirs of that "startlingly prophetic" utterance delivered to the
Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield. Its most electrifying passage,
as Wilson notes, contains a warning against a "towering genius,"
thirsting and burning for distinction, who would disdain to
perpetuate a government which would only be a monument to
the fame of others, and might destroy the existing fabric either
by "emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen." As Wilson ob-
serves, the warning is ambiguous, and this Ubermensch is de-
scribed "with a fire that seemed to derive as much from admira-
tion as from apprehension." The ambiguity, Wilson perceives,
stems not only from the mingling of attraction and dread with

184 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

which Lincoln seems to regard the figure he has conjured, but
from his apparent neutrality with respect to the moral quality of
acts of emancipation and of enslavement. "It was as if," writes Wil-
son, "he had not only foreseen the drama but had even seen all
around it, with a kind of poetic objectivity, aware of the various
points of view that the world must take toward its protagonist." 1
Thus the indictment we have drawn in the first chapter of this
work, the indictment of Lincoln as master villain of American his-
tory, was conceived long before revisionist historiography; indeed,
it was conceived as an abstract possibility long before the events
the historians recorded. For when Lincoln in 1838 saw that the
emancipation of the slaves might be possible, or might be believed
to be possible, only by the overthrow of the government estab-
lished by the Fathers, he anticipated in principle every profound
objection to the role he one day unhesitatingly played. "He had
in some sense imagined [the] drama himself had even pre-
figured Booth and the aspect he would wear for Booth when
the latter would leap down from the Presidential box crying 'Sic
semper tyrannis!'" 2 For in the Lyceum speech Lincoln had com-
pared the possible future American Emancipatorwho might be
the destroyer of the American republicto Caesar. And thus had
he, as Wilson indicates, cast the role of the American Brutus
twenty-seven years before it was played by Booth.

The task of interpreting the thought of Lincoln is very different
from interpreting that of Douglas. In part this stems from the
difference in the situations of the two men: Douglas early became
and remained a national figure and was almost continuously oc-
cupied with politics on the highest level. From the fact that he
was a leading contender for his party's presidential nomination
from 1852 on, he was a prisoner of that peculiar difficulty of
American politics, "availability." That there was a large consist-
ency to everything he did, we believe and have maintained; but
to educe it from the heat of the political battles, in which every-
thing he did and said was struck off, has been like resolving many
contrary component forces into a single vector. Lincoln's career,
on the contrary, until 1854, was as undistinguished as Douglas's
had been brilliant. He became a skilled practitioner of the arts
of party politics; he was a ranking Whig in his home state; but
his record was that of a party faithful, a wheel horse of the
machine, adept in caucuses, "smoke-filled rooms," and on the
stump. His most notable achievement was in securing the removal

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 185

of the state capital from Vandalia to Springfield. His speeches
in the state legislature, and in Congress during his one term,
contain rhetorical flights and some robust humor suggestive of
powers capable of greater objects than the advocacy of Whig
orthodoxy. Yet it is difficult to imagine this oratory commanding
much attention today had the career of its author not taken such
a dramatic and unexpected turn.

Or was it unexpected? Here we touch a tantalizing question,
one assuredly close to the heart of Lincoln's amazing fascination.
Did Lincoln, all the years he was, to put it bluntly, a hack
politician, secretly fancy himself in the stupendous drama he had
contemplated in the Lyceum speech? Was he serving his ap-
prenticeship in politics with the conscious expectation of one day
playing the master craftsman? We cannot answer these questions
except by showing, as we propose to do, that all the while Lincoln
was engaged in the more or less petty bread-and-butter party
questions, during his early years, he also produced occasional
pieces, of permanent value, upon "the great and durable question
of the age." There are, in particular, two public addresses by
Lincoln the Lyceum speech already mentioned and the Temper-
ance Address delivered on Washington's Birthday, 1842, to the
Springfield Washington Temperance Society in which Lincoln
forecasts and diagnoses a political and moral crisis of popular
government In neither of these speeches does he openly present
the problem of slavery in the leading position it occupies in the
Second Inaugural Rather does he see the difficulty of free govern-
ment in the broader context of the eternal problem created by
the power of evil passionsof which slavery is but a particular
manifestation over mankind. Because the young Lincoln ob-
served the forms of the occasions upon which he spoke, the highly
unconventional content of his thought has been overlooked for
its conventional expression. Yet both these pieces are intellectual
tours de force, and at least one of them, the Temperance Address,
is a literary masterpiece and a masterpiece of political satire.
The two speeches complement each other. The central topic of
both is the same, but the first emphasizes the political side, the
second the moral. For Lincoln, the question of the "capability
of a people to govern themselves* was always twofold: it referred
both to the viability of popular political institutions and to their
moral basis in the individual men who must make those institu-
tions work If the men who exercised the decisive influence in a

l86 POIITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

popular government were not themselves "self-governed" i.e.,
self -controlled then it was vain to expect the institutions to be
so. The two speeches describe the leading dangers, as Lincoln
saw them, that evil passions might insinuate themselves into the
operation of a free government and thereby destroy it.

To say that Lincoln, as he was mastering the politician's craft
and outwardly leading a life hardly distinguishable from countless
others, had all the while contemplated and exerted himself to
prepare for the greatest role in the greatest crisis he could imagine
coming in his lifetime is, as we have said, to disturb somewhat
the popular image of Lincoln as the prototype of the common
man. And it is no light matter, for anyone deeply affected by
Lincoln's Civil War oratory, to trouble this much-loved image.
For no one did more than Lincoln himself to promote belief in
the uncommon resources of the common man. In so far as Lincoln
as President permitted himself to be celebrated, he was ever care-
ful that his own achievement, no less than his office, be considered
representative. That Lincoln's "uncommon commonness" was a
studied effect a work of art so successful that all traces of art
have vanished from it may therefore prove somewhat unsettling.
In a sense, it throws doubt upon the truth of the assumption
upon which Lincoln's advocacy of the people's cause rested: that
the "people," without leaders uniquely endowed or specially
trained, could furnish out of their midst men for any office or
contingency. Lincoln sounded this theme in his very first message
to Congress, July 4, 1861, upon the outbreak of hostilities:

This is essentially a people's contest ... a struggle for main-
taining in the world that form and substance of government
whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men . . .

And from the outset this meant a government that was not only
for the people but by and of them:

It may be affirmed, without extravagance, that the free in-
stitutions we enjoy have developed the powers and improved
the condition of our whole people, beyond any example in
the world . . . there are many single regiments whose mem-
bers, one and another, possess full practical knowledge of

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 187

all the arts, sciences, and professions . . . and there is scarcely
one from which there could not be selected a President, a
Cabinet, a Congress, and perhaps a court, abundantly com-
petent to administer the Government itself!

And again:

Great honor is due to those officers who remained true,
despite the example of their treacherous associates; but the
greatest honor, and most important fact of all, is the unani-
mous firmness of the common soldiers and common sailors.
To the last man, so far as known, they have successfully
resisted the traitorous efforts of those whose commands, but
an hour before, they obeyed as absolute law. This is the
patriotic instinct of plain people. They understand, without
an argument, that the destroying the Government which was
made by Washington means no good to them. 8

Toward the end of the war he addressed an Ohio regiment,
saying:

I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am
a living witness that any one of your children may look to
come here as my father's child has.

But Lincoln's praise of the ability, fidelity, and wisdom of plain
people, of common soldiers and sailors, is raised to a higher and
different level at Gettysburg. Upon this level it is transformed
into a capacity for glory:

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say
here, but it can never forget what they did here.

The acid title of Richard Hofstadter's widely read essay in
The American Political Tradition, "Abraham Lincoln and the
Self-Made Myth," ungraciously expresses an important truth.
Simple souls have indeed been harmlessly imposed upon to think
that Lincoln really did not expect his words to be recalled. Yet
Lincoln knew, as well as Pericles or Churchill, how utterly the
immortality of the deed depends upon the immortality of the
word. Tn the beginning was the Word." Lincoln knew that only
as the incantation upon the silent field renewed the sacred fire
which had passed from those who had given their last full
measure would freedom be born again. It is entirely improbable

l88 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

that Lincoln performed his task with such skill and did not know
what he was doing. It is impossible he should have understood
the function of his own oratory whose premise is that, unless
its exhortation is obeyed, these dead shall have died in vain
without understanding the even greater renown success would
confer upon him. But again this brings us to the question with
which we began this work. Was the cause of popular government
but the matter from which Lincoln's own fame was to be
wrought? Glory was traditionally the prerogative of kings and
noblemen, and in war the path of glory was supposedly found.
The common people, in their wretched anonymous millions, had
perished through the ages for the triumphal processions of these
usually unscarred heroes. Did Lincoln, like the "towering genius"
of the Lyceum speech, deliberately lead the American people
down the path to war because in no other way could he escape
the common fate and lot for which his otherwise commonplace
career seemed destined?

More, probably, has been written of Lincoln in less than a
single century than of any political figure of whom the records
survive. Yet in some respects the vast accretion of Lincolniana
has shrouded rather than disclosed the figure of the man within.
One reason, we suggest, is that few of those who have literally
left no stone (or log or rail) unturned in the quest for every day
in his life have asked what that Me consisted in, from the point
of view of their subject. Lincoln himself was singularly uninter-
ested in the facts that have so fascinated posterity. Lord Charn-
wood recounts that "when he had been nominated for the Presi-
dency he was asked for material for an account of his early life.
Why,' he said, 'it is great folly to attempt to make anything out
of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single
sentence; and that sentence you will find in Gray's Elegy: 'The
short and simple annals of the poor.' That's my life, and that's
all you or anyone else can make out of it/" Of course when he
said this he was running for office, and Lincoln's identification
with the "poor," the "plain people," and the "common" folk was
as much a part of his platform as opposition to the spread of
slavery. Lincoln was a great actor, and he did not step out of
character. Yet the lack of interest he displayed in the story of his
own lif e was not affected. Great acting is also born of conviction,
and Lincoln believed in the role he played. The difficulty lies
in identifying that role. Lincoln was not uninterested in himself,

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 189

as is shown by the extreme self -consciousness he sometimes dis-
played, nor assuredly did he undervalue himself. But Lincoln did
not see in commonplace occurrences the record of the life of
which he was so conscious.

I was born and have ever remained in the most humble
walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations to recom-
mend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independ-
ent voters of this county, and if elected they will have
conferred a favor upon me, for which I shall be unremitting
in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in their
wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have
been too familiar with disappointments to be very much
chagrined. 4

With such statements in mind Professor Hofstadter has well said
that "the first author of the Lincoln legend and the greatest of
the Lincoln dramatists was Lincoln himself." It is not surprising,
then, that so much effort has been made to find in the humble
walks of his life and in his acquaintance with grief and dis-
appointment the secrets of Lincoln's strength.

Yet in this same address to the people of Sangamon County,
when he first ran for elective office (for the state assembly, for
which he was defeated), Lincoln also used these highly revealing
words: "Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether
it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great
as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering
myself worthy of their esteem." Since this statement was made
in an election handbill, there can be no question that "being
truly esteemed" included receiving their suffrages. And we know
that in a democracy a man does not render himself worthy i.e.,
does not cause himself to be thus "esteemed" merely by culti-
vating virtue, as virtue was traditionally understood.

That man," wrote Herndon, his law partner for seventeen years
in Springfield, "who thinks Lincoln calmly gathered his robes
about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous
knowledge of Lincoln. He was always calculating and planning
ahead. His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest" Lincoln
was ambitious, and ambition, as he one day wrote to General
Hooker, *\vithin reasonable bounds does good rather than harm."
But what bounds does reason prescribe? To put the problem in
its classic form: Are the things that make a man worthy of the

190 POUTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

esteem of his fellow men the same as the things that cause him
to be esteemed? In a sense the whole case for popular government
rests upon the affirmation of the ultimate identity of the two;
even as the case against popular government, from Plato's
Apology of Socrates on down, has rested upon the denial of
their compatibility, much less identity. If the things a man must
do to achieve office in a democracy, particularly high office, are
degrading to him as is so frequently believedthen it is impossi-
ble to believe seriously that the government of such men is
elevating. If the "best men" hold in contempt the esteem Lincoln
so avidly sought, then government of and by the people cannot
long endure. How to reconcile the demands of virtue, of a self-
respect conscious of no stooping in its conquest of honor, with
the achievement of the honor which flows from popular recogni-
tion, hoc opus, hie labor est. Woodrow Wilson once remarked
that the phenomenon of Lincoln had made it possible to believe
in democracy. Wilson was acutely sensitive to the tension between
love of fame and love of excellence; he knew that their reconcilia-
tion was problematical and that democracy, not as something to
be suffered, but as something to be loved, as an embodiment
of man's aspiration, required a conviction that a man of the
people, chosen by the people, could exemplify moral and
intellectual greatness.

Lincoln has been understood and correctly understood as the
supreme advocate of the cause of popular government. But it is
not because he saw no problem, no difficulty, in adopting that
advocacy. Noble things are difficult, said Aristotle, and the nobler
more difficult. Lincoln saw popular government as most noble and
most difficult. His First Inaugural address exhorts "a patient con*
fidence in the ultimate justice of the people." Yet the Second
Inaugural tells us that this same people had offended divine
justice; and a terrible punishment, willed not by man, was neces-
sary to expiate the offense. The "ultimate justice" of the people
depends, therefore, upon a purification which it is not in their
own unaided power to accomplish. A case against the people,
as well as for diem, was present in Lincoln's thought from begin-
ning to end. Because he grappled with this antagonism, Lincoln's
thought, for all the pristine clarity with which he expressed
himself, is extraordinarily complex. Whether Lincoln grappled
successfully in the first great phase of his career, the long duel with

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION igi

Douglas, it will be our duty to inquire. The answer to the question
will, in considerable measure, tell us whether, in Wilson's sense, we
are entitled to believe in democracy. Of one flung, however, we
may be certain. Lincoln would never have accepted as his own
justification the fact that, in the end, he was chosen by the people
and Douglas rejected. For the whole struggle with Douglas
revolved precisely around the question of tie moral demands
which must be obeyed by a people if the people themselves
are to possess the title deeds to respect and obedience. How
conscious Lincoln was of this difficulty, we may now observe by
turning to his Lyceum speech of 1838.

This speech, being a set piece, has its exordium and peroration.
It begins by stating its subject, "the perpetuation of our political
institutions," and continues celebrating the happy circumstances
of the American people, in peaceful possession of the fairest
portion of the earth and with a political system "conducing more
essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of
which the history of former times tells us." But, says Lincoln,
"We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them
they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and
patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.
Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess
themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and
to uprear upon its hills and valleys, a political edifice of liberty
and equal rights; 'tis ours only, to transmit these ... to the latest
generation . . ." We are immediately struck by the resemblance
to the great speech of a quarter century after, whose opening
sentence is an exquisite condensation of the foregoing. Yet the
differences are not merely literary. This is not an immature ver-
sion; its more elaborate presentation will help considerably to
throw into relief the majestic austerities of the Gettysburg
Address. Let us note for the present this further resemblance:
both speeches begin with a pious invocation of the Fathers; they
are the Founders who, like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, by their
merit brought blessings to us, their descendants; and, like Moses,
gave the laws which we have the lesser task of maintaining. Yet
both speeches, of 1838 and 1863, as they proceed-the one prophe-

1Q2 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

sying, the other proclaimingtell of a crisis and test greater than
that of the Fathers, which must be passed if the good allegedly
possessed, or brought into the world by them, is truly to be
achieved. But still more: the greatness of the test is also a measure
of the greatness of the good and of the men who achieved it.
The "new birth of freedom" is not a mere renewal of the old; it
is also a transcendence of it. We shall see this theme expressed
with great subtlety in the 1838 speech, although without the
Shakespearean pathos of the words spoken upon the battlefield.

Now Lincoln asks how shall we perform this duty the duty to
transmit the land "unprofaned by the foot of the invader," the
institutions "undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpa-
tion"? In good Whig fashion he dismisses all foreign danger. "As
a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by
suicide." Then comes the body of the address, in which are spelled
out the principal dangers threatening our polity from within.

This has three main parts. The first deals with the present
evils of mob rule, which has been sweeping the country. The
second, the future danger of the "towering genius" who will seize
the opportunity created by the confusion raised by the mob to
erect one-man rule. Third is also a future danger, resulting from
the fading public spirit of the Revolution, the release of base
passions originally held in check by or turned against a common
enemy and for some time subdued by the memory of the
Revolution.

The section dealing with mob rule is the lengthiest, although
that dealing with the dangerous leader is, conspicuously, the
central one. The evils of mob rule, in Lincoln's account, are
threefold: the direct evils of unlawful violence; the indirect evil,
by which unpunished crimes encourage the 'lawless in spirit . . .
to become lawless in practice"; and last and worst, the aliena-
tion of the feelings of "good men" and the "best citizens" from
the government. It is this alienation which sets the stage for the
unprincipled leader.

Let us examine Lincoln's account of the "mobocratic spirit,
which all must admit, is now abroad in the land." Although he
says its depredations are confined to no single part of the country,
but "Alike . . . spring up among the pleasure hunting masters
of Southern slaves, and die order loving citizens of the land of
steady habits," his preface can hardly be said to show sectional

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 193

impartiality. And all his actual episodes are lynchings in slave
states. However, there is more impartiality than strikes the eye.
Events in Illinois, we shall see, are in the foreground of Lincoln's
attention, and his choosing to discuss home problems by referring
to happenings elsewhere is characteristic of his rhetorical tech-
nique. Those happening in the State of Mississippi, and at St.
Louis, are, perhaps, the most dangerous in example and revolting
to humanity ."

In the Mississippi case, they first commenced by hanging the
regular gamblers; a set of men, certainly not following for
a livelihood, a very useful, or very honest occupation; but
one which, so far from being forbidden by the laws, was
actually licensed by an act of the Legislature, passed but a
single year before. Next, negroes, suspected of conspiring to
raise an insurrection, were caught up and hanged in all parts
of the State: then, white men, supposed to be leagued with
negroes; and finally, strangers, from neighboring States, going
thither on business, were in many instances subjected to the
same fate.

Thus, Lincoln exclaims, the process went on, from gamblers to
Negroes, to white citizens, to strangers, "till dead men were seen
literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side;
and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss
of the country, as a drapery of the forest."

The second "horror-striking scene" concerns a mulatto man in
St. Louis whose "story is short; and is perhaps, the most highly
tragic, of anything of its length . . ." This man was "seized in
the street, dragged to the suburbs . . . chained to a tree, and
actually burned to death . . . within a single hour from the time
he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at
peace with the world."

Next Lincoln turns to explain how the indirect consequences
are worse than the direct. In so doing he employs one of his
curious rhetorical dtmarclies, which interrupts the edifying but
nonetheless platitudinous moralizing. We would expect him to
say, "Bad as these things are, their potential for evil is still greater."
Instead, he goes to considerable-nay, almost shocking-length to
show that at least in the case of the gamblers and the St. Louis
mulatto no great harm had been done at all.

194 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

Abstractly considered, the hanging of the gamblers . . . was
of but little consequence. They constitute a portion of popu-
lation, that is worse than useless in any community; and
their death, if no pernicious example be set by it, is never
matter of reasonable regret with any one. If they were
annually swept, from the stage of existence, by the plague
or smallpox, honest men would, perhaps, be much profited,
by the operation.

And:

Similar too, is the correct reasoning, in regard to the burning
of the negro at St. Louis. He had forfeited his life, by the
perpetration of an outrageous murder, upon one of the most
worthy and respectable citizens of the city; and had he not
died as he did, he must have died by sentence of the law, in
a very short time. As to him alone, it was as well the way
it was, as it could otherwise have been.

We must remark the way in which Lincoln deliberately paints
a contrast between a "mulatto" dragged to a flaming death within
an hour of the time he had been free, minding his own business
and at peace with the world, and a "negro" who had murdered
a leading citizen. Surely the portrayal of the former hardly
suggests the latter! But is it ever "as well . . . as it could otherwise
have been" to burn a man who has not even been convicted
of a crime? As to the gamblers, when is it "never matter of reason-
able regret" for men to be lynched, particularly, as Lincoln has
been at pains to point out (thus also heightening the contrast,
as with the peaceful mulatto turned negro-murderer), when they
have pursued a vocation sanctioned by law? These strange
passages, however, are not nearly so conspicuous in context. For
there they are prefaced with the observation that the direct con-
sequences of mob rule "are, comparatively speaking, but a small
evil; and much of its dangers consists, in the proneness of our
minds, to regard its direct, as its only consequences." Hence the
"abstract consideration" concerning the gamblers and the "correct
reasoning" concerning the St. Louis lynching are presented as
examples of erroneous judgments toward which our minds are
said to be prone. Such reasoning, according to Lincoln, may
extenuate or even justify mob violence; and he tells us that it is
important both to distinguish this reasoning from the blind
prejudice of the mob and to realize that it may also mislead us.

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 195

Yet Lincoln did not go to the lengths he did to present these
cases in such different lights, in successive paragraphs, only to
make the simple point above. The entire speech is a defense of
the rule of law from all forms of arbitrary rule. The mob is one
extreme of arbitrariness, the Caesar-dictator another; and the ex-
treme of one kind of arbitrariness tends to engender the other, as
the sequel will tell us. The idea of the rule of law rejects the
notion that any individual or any group has sufficient wisdom
and virtue to be trusted with the decision of individual cases on
their own merits, without regard to general rules established by
and through the authority of the whole community. Yet the fact
remains, as Lincoln insinuates, that, abstractly considered, the
rule of law is inferior to discretionary rule, just because each case
would be better decided if it could be decided on its own merits.
And it is as important to recognize the abstract superiority of
discretionary rule as it is to recognize its practical inferiority.

Why so? Because all law aims at abstract justice, with respect
to which it is a means. This end, which is translegal, is a percep-
tion of the discretionary judgment of wise men; and the law
must be informed by such judgmentor be believed to be so
informed if it is to command respect. Men will submit to abuses
tolerated by the law if they feel these abuses are tolerated rather
than enjoined or abetted by the law. In the fifties Lincoln was
again and again to refer to the proposition, "all men are created
equal," as an "abstract truth," a truth which was the life principle
of American law. The implications of this truth were only partially
realized, even for white men, and largely denied as far as black
men were concerned. Yet it supplied the direction, the meaning,
of all good laws in this country, although the attempt at that time
to achieve all that might and ought ultimately to be demanded
in its name would have been disastrous. A law is foolish which
does not aim at abstract or intrinsic justice; and so is it foolish
to attempt to achieve abstract justice as the sole good by
succumbing to the fallacy to which the mind is prone, which
regards direct consequences as if they were the only conse-
quences. Those who believe anything sanctioned by law is right
commit one great error; those who believe the law should sanc-
tion only what is right commit another. Either error might
result in foolish laws; and, although a foolish law may be prefera-
ble to a wise dictator, a wise law is preferable to both.

1Q6 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

Lincoln minimized the intrinsic evil of hanging gamblers and
burning murderers without due process of law. But there is, by
contrast, no attempt, as there was no possibility, of minimizing
the evil of the many lynchings caused by the frenzied fear of
servile insurrection. The case of the gamblers, it is clear in
retrospect, was mentioned chiefly because of its involvement in
this more serious episode. The St. Louis affair, moreover, whose
Intrinsic importance Lincoln downgrades sharply, also was in-
volved in a chain of events. Lincoln does not choose to identify
these explicitly, for reasons we must attempt to fathom. Toward
the end of paragraph nine, however, he enumerates as follows
some of the kinds of mob violence which, if they are not stopped,
will certainly lead to the overthrow of our political system:

. . . whenever the vicious portion of the population shall
be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands,
and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw
printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn
obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend
upon it, this Government cannot last.

At this point there is, in the new (1954) collected edition of
Lincoln's works, the following annotation:

Dwelling as he does on the horrors of lynch law in Mississippi
and Missouri, Lincoln may seem remiss in ignoring, save for
this phrase, the lynching at Alton, Illinois, on November 7,
1837, of the abolitionist editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy. It is
somewhat too obvious and naive to assume that Lincoln was
being politic in avoiding reference to an episode so recent
and so vivid in the recollection of his audience. Rather it
seems possible that he chose a subtler way of pricking the
conscience of his audience than by direct denunciation.
Members of the Lyceum who listened to Lincoln without
sensing the specter of Lovejoy in their midst must have been
obtuse indeed. 6

It is somewhat incongruous that Mr. Easier, Lincoln's editor,
thinks it naive to assume a politician is being politic. In fact,
however, the subtlety which he correctly imputes to Lincoln ex-
emplifies that very quality. It should be known that the Lovejoy
killing, some eleven weeks before the Lyceum speech, was the
most famous abolitionist martyrdom until John Brown. And

TEACHING: POUTICAL SALVATION 197

Alton (to be the scene of the last joint debate) was a town in
southern Illinois, some fifty or sixty miles from Springfield, on the
east bank of the Mississippi, near St. Louis. It was a wealthy and
growing community, the commercial rival of St. Louis for the
trade of the Deep South. Alton's traders were mostly New
Englanders, and their attitudes were much like those of the cotton
Whigs of Boston: they had no use for either slavery or abolition.
Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister turned anti-slavery (and also
anti-Catholic) crusader, had been operating in St. Louis for some
time. In his paper he had castigated both the crowd which had
lynched Mclntosh and the judge who had charged the grand jury
not to return indictments for the lynching if, as he pointed out
for their convenience, they found that "the deed was done by
'congregated thousands' whose names could not be ascertained." 6
It was Lovejoy's activity in the Mclntosh business which led the
mob to throw his press into the river for the first time (there were
three more times to come) and caused him to move across the
Mississippi to Alton. There his activities led to renewed mob
violence, and he was finally shot down as, gun in hand, he and
a band of armed supporters sought to defend his newly arrived
fourth press in the warehouse in which it had just been stored.
It should be realized that the economic well-being of Alton, in
competition with St. Louis, depended upon the favor of New
Orleans customers. And Illinois, during the previous year, had
been bombarded (in common with other northern states) with
petitions and memorials from slave-state legislatures to take action
against abolitionism. The legislature had responded, in January
1837 a year before the Lyceum speech with resolutions de-
nouncing abolitionism, although not recommending any further
action against it. Six weeks after these resolutions, a protest
against them was spread upon the journal of the House, signed
by Dan Stone and A. Lincoln, representatives of Sangamon
County, which declared that "the institution of slavery is founded
on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation
of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its
evils . . ." The protest is mild enough. Where the resolutions had
said that Congress "cannot abolish slavery in the District of Co-
lumbia, against the consent of the citizens of said District without
a manifest breach of good faith," Lincoln and Stone insisted that
Congress had the power but ought not to exercise it "unless at the
request of the people of said District." The crucial difference,

198 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

without question, was the insistence that slavery itself was unjust
Even here there is more of a shift of emphasis than a break with
the majority. For the joint select committee which had reported
the resolutions, even while denouncing abolitionism in unmeas-
ured terms, had deeply deplored "the unfortunate condition of
our fellow-men, whose lots are cast in thraldom in a land of liberty
and peace/' 7

But why the delay of six weeks? Beveridge at least does not
hesitate to suggest that Lincoln was being "politic." "If Lincoln
and Stone held the opinions expressed in their protest . . . they
were not without reasons of practical politics for their delay. They
were intent upon securing the permanent location of the state
capital at Springfield. Nothing must interfere with that supreme
purpose, no member be offended unnecessarily, no risk hazarded
of losing a single vote without urgent cause. Not until that matter
had been settled did they submit their views on the slavery
question." 8 It is not necessary to add, as Beveridge does, that
"Lincoln subordinated everything to Springfield's interest," to see
that he was not a man to squander political credit The problem
of political rhetoric is treated more explicitly in the Temperance
Address; yet Lincoln's protest with Stone against the anti-abolition
resolutions of the Illinois legislature and his handling of the same
question in the Lyceum Address already exemplify his lifelong
conception of political leadership. That conception calls for
mollifying, never antagonizing, the feelings of those whom he
would lead. So to do was for Lincoln more than an act of pru-
dence, it partook of a moral imperative: for if the cause of
free government was noble, then a necessary condition of leader-
ship in such a government could not be ignoble. But this, in
turn, would have been absurd if deference to popular feelings
were indiscriminate: Lincoln's attack upon the mob, and the
passions the mob represented, shows that this is not his drift.
But Lincoln believed, and always found, in popular demands
an aspiration for justice, an aspiration for what was noble. Even
the mob that killed Lovejoy might have felt it was defending
the Constitution or the rights of Catholics, whom Lovejoy vilely
slandered. The task of a leader is to find the point of coincidence
between the moral demands which are dear to the men he would
lead and their self-interests, and to turn this, not only against the
unjust self-interests of others, but against the unjust self-interests
of his own followers. The popular leader must be prepared to

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION

gratify the less-than-noble but not immoral demands of his
would-be supporters if he is to have their support for the higher
purposes of statesmanship. To hold these meaner services in con-
tempt is to abandon popular government to those who have only
mean ends, and to make of popular government a mean thing.
Men may be led toward higher purposes of which they are
scarcely conscious, if those who hold these purposes first show
concern for and an ability to gratify their less noble demands.

There can be no doubt that the mob violence Lincoln had in
mind when he composed the Lyceum speech, the violence which
supplies the subject matter for nearly two thirds of that speech,
was exclusively violence arising from abolitionism and the reaction
to it. Or, to be more just, we should say that it was violence
arising from the renewed life and vigor of the institution of chattel
slavery, which was caused by the cotton gin. This economic
renewal of slavery falsified all the Fathers' expectations concern-
ing the institution. Without this renewal there would have been
neither northern abolitionism nor the southern reaction to aboli-
tionism. Yet Lincoln keeps this crucial cause of mob violence out
of sight, choosing not to make pro- and anti-slavery passions his
theme. The prudential reasons for this are easy to see: abolition-
ism was probably not appreciably more popular in Springfield
than in Alton; if he had attacked the Alton mobs for their attack
on Lovejoy, he would have accomplished nothing but his own
political ruin. But if Lincoln could not afford to be identified
with Lovejoy's cause, neither did he have any wish to advance
it, since Lovejoy's cause was in certain respects the same as the
mob's. For abolitionism was precisely one of those things that,
with an eye fixed on "abstract" justice alone, and careless of
consequences, would also have overthrown the Constitution.

The theme of abolitionism is dealt with explicitly only once
in the address. It occurs at the end of the section on mob rule, as
the second part of the discussion of the remedy for mob rule. The
principal remedy is "political religion," which shall be treated
at length later; but redress of grievances through change of laws
is a supplement to the aforesaid religion. Lincoln's sole example
of grievances is "the promulgation of abolitionism." In any such
case, he says:

one of two positions is necessarily true; that is, the thing
is right within itself, and therefore deserves the protection

2OO POUHCAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

of all law and all good citizens; or, it is wrong, and therefore
proper to be prohibited by legal enactments; and in neither
case, is the interposition of mob law, either necessary, justi-
fiable, or excusable.

It is remarkable that Lincoln apparently considers positive
action based upon the intrinsic lightness or wrongness of the
doctrine as exhaustive alternatives, saying nothing of the right
of speech to be protected irrespective of its quality. This could
hardly have been an oversight, since freedom of speech was
ground on which the abolitionists stridently took their stand. One
reason, we suggest, is that Lincoln had publicly gone on record
that slavery was unjust; and it followed that abolition of slavery
was, "within itself," therefore just. That Lincoln believed the
abolitionists deserved the protection of law is, in one sense, the
burden of the entire speech; but it is a message which Lincoln
believes can better be conveyed if mob law is attacked as wrong
rather than abolition defended. For abolitionism, although right
"within itself," is not unqualifiedly right. Abolitionism, as we
have suggested, wished to overthrow slavery, not by means
sanctioned by the Constitution, but by means outside the Con-
stitution. Abolitionists did not claim freedom of speech in order
to persuade men lawfully to rid themselves of slavery. The lawful
undermining of slavery, which had seen six of the original thirteen
states abolish it in the fifty years after independence, and active
agitation against slavery continue to win public favor in many
southern states, had been arrested and reversed. The abolitionism
of the Garrison and Lovejoy variety which did much to reverse
this trend was directed exclusively toward opinion in the free
states, toward convincing those who had no constitutional power
over slavery where it existed. Although abolitionists sometimes
denied the illegality of their aims, they were as unconvincing
as the Communists in our day who have said they intend nothing
but victory at the polls. As we have already observed, many de-
nounced the Constitution and Union openly. For the rest it made
absolutely no sense to seek converts to their cause in New York,
Massachusetts, or Illinois, unless the power of the free states was
to be eventually exerted against slavery in the slave states.
Abolition aimed to create an opinion which would sanction the
use of federal power by national majorities to interfere with
slavery; and the fear that the government itself would become

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an agency of unlawful violence was at the root of much of the
passion directed against abolitionists. Lincoln's position was that
slavery, like gambling, might be wrong in itself and yet be
sanctioned by law. But to take the short, illegal way with slavery
or gambling is also wrong, just as it was wrong to take the short,
illegal way with abolitionists. The abolitionists, taking their
unpopular stand under the claim of a right to freedom of speech,
had constitutional sanction (generally speaking, for the Four-
teenth Amendment had not yet brought the First Amendment
to bear upon the states) for their means, although none for their
ends. The anti-abolitionist mobs, on the other hand, had good
constitutional ground for their opposition to abolitionism but none
for their violent methods. Both abolitionism and anti-abolitionism
undermined respect for the law, and Lincoln attacked both at
the point common to both, in their tendency to lawlessness.

But what of Lincoln's silence on the right of free speech? That
abolition was abstractly right, and therefore deserved legal pro-
tection, does not explain Lincoln's apparent readiness to place
under legislative ban any doctrine wrong "within itself." Here,
however, there is no equivocation or reserve: Lincoln never
apparently gave the slightest credence to the doctrine wide-
spread in our time, that there is any indefeasible right to promul-
gate freely doctrines "wrong within themselves." Lincoln thought,
as he said during the Civil War, that a government "thoroughly
imbued with a reverence for the guaranteed rights of individuals"
is slow to move against abuses of personal liberty. But there are
circumstances in which such a government may be endangered
by such abuses and the attempt at indiscriminate protection of
all so-called personal liberties would be a vain folly. For not only
may the government whose existence alone protects all rights be
endangered by some of them, but the abuse of some rights by
some people may lead to the invasion of other rights of other
people. It is not always possible simultaneously to protect all
rights, and then a choice must be made between those of greater
and those of lesser importance. "Must I shoot a simple-minded
soldier boy who deserts," asked Lincoln, in that memorable
wartime pronouncement, "while I must not touch a hair of a wily
agitator who induces him to desert? This is nonetheless injurious
when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend into a
public meeting, and there working upon his feelings till he is

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOXJNG WHIG

persuaded to write the soldier boy that he is fighting in a bad
cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptible government,
too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I think that,
in such a case, to silence the agitator and save the boy is not
only constitutional but withal a great mercy." 9 Freedom of speech
is very precious, but so are justice and mercy, and there are
times when the latter take precedence of the former. Can it be
doubted that if the spread of the doctrine of the "positive good"
of chattel slavery oould have been arrested by legal enactment
(we do not say that it could have), its suppression would have
been just and merciful? It was Lincoln's belief that the spread of
the opinion that slavery was morally rightas distinct from
expedient was the sufficient cause of all the differences which,
in 1860, were beyond compromise. Without it there would have
been no war. As a rule, Lincoln was inclined to regard the in-
direct evils of suppressing speech as outweighing any direct good.
But what he said in 1838 about the propriety of suppressing
doctrines wrong in themselves is fully consistent with what he said
at Cooper Union in 1860. When he then pointed out to the South
that the Republican party had no abolitionist aims, never had
had them, and had always disavowed them, he asked:

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing,
what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call
slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right . . . Senator
Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced,
suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong . . .

Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save
our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all
words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves
wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. 10

If slavery is right, all words against it are wrong and should be
silenced. But if slavery is not right, all words advocating it are
wrong. In a free society, in which the opinions formed by speech
are the basis of all government, it is idle to forbid changes in
the government while permitting changes in the opinion upon
which the government rests. The Constitution guarantees to each
state a republican form of government. Such guarantee like the
guarantee that the representation of each state in the Senate
shall not be reduced without its own consent implies a perpetuity
in certain fundamentals of the Constitution, beyond the reach

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of all majorities, even in three fourths of the states. For Lincoln
the primary task of political leadership was to maintain and
strengthen the opinion upon which these funda rentals rested.
There was no question that the advocacy of the opinions favorable
to freedom was the only durably effective means of combating
opinions hostile to freedom. This is what Lincoln believed he was
doing throughout his long struggle with Douglas. And Lincoln
himself never advocated sedition laws even in the Cooper
Union speech. All he did was to concede the justice of Douglas's
demand for such a law, if slavery was right. Freedom of speech,
to Lincoln, was logically a subordinate right, subordinate to the
right of personal freedom, of which it was an implication. A man
cannot be a slave and have freedom of speech; and if the right
to personal freedom is in question, there is no point in defending
freedom of speech. Since Lincoln denied there was any difference
in principle between the enslavement of white men and Negroes,
and since the challenge of slavery extension involved the whole
question of the right to personal freedom, he thought the issue
must be joined on the paramount ground of the rightness or
wrongness of slavery. Thus it was that he regarded Douglas's
demand for a cessation of the discussion of the slavery question
as wholly absurd. It was the only thing worth discussing. And
upon the decision of this question hinged the fate of all liberties
that men can enjoy only if they are legally free. However inex-
pedient it may be to suppress the speech of those who advocate
slavery, it would have been absurd to Lincoln to speak of an
indefeasible right to advocate slavery. Certainly men threatened
with enslavement by the spread of pro-slavery opinionand
Lincoln believed the long-range threat to free white labor was
nothing less than their reduction to the condition of Negro slaves
have a moral right to any means that will destroy this threat.

We have seen why, from the viewpoint both of prudence and
abstract principle, it would have defeated Lincoln's purpose either
to attack or defend abolitionism. But Lincoln had still another
and more profound reason in the Lyceum speech to keep the
slavery controversy for the most part out of sight For Lincoln
meant to present an analysis of the problem of popular govern-
ment in the light of the eternal antagonism within the human
soul of reason and passion. For this purpose it was necessary not
to permit the supposition that any immediate cause of conflict,

2O4 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

however grave, was the sole or sufficient cause of a threat to
the perpetuation of our political institutions.

Of the indirect consequences of mob rule the worst, according
to Lincoln, is that which breaks down the attachment of the
people to their government Of particular danger is the alienation
of "the feelings of the best citizens," leaving it "without friends,
or with too few, and those few too weak/' "At such a time and
under such circumstances, men of sufficient talent and ambition
will not be found wanting to seize the opportunity, strike the blow,
and overturn that fair fabric, which for the last half century, has
been the fondest hope, of the lovers of freedom, throughout the
world." The coup d'&at Lincoln appears to visualize is suggest-
ive of what our century knows as Fascism; i.e., a political move-
ment combining the bread and circuses of Caesarism with the
demand for security by the middle classes, the "good men" de-
scribed by Lincoln who 'love tranquillity" and cannot abide the
turmoil and constant danger to the security of their persons, fami-
lies, and property that an undisciplined populace, intoxicated by
power, may threaten. A Whiggish protest against Jacksonian
democracy may be sensed in this part of Lincoln's speech, as
well as the spirit of the Federalist, the spirit of protest against
the turbulence of Shays's rebellion, and the excesses of "democ-
racy" that culminated in the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
Yet Lincoln's analysis of the Caesarian danger, although it does
not contradict the thesis of the Federalist, goes beyond it Lincoln
sees a danger which Hamilton and Madison did not take into
account and for which constitution building, however excellent,
is insufficient. The following from #51 would seem representative
of the doctrine of the celebrated papers: "Ambition must be made
to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected
with the constitutional rights of the place . . . the private interest
of every individual [must] be a sentinel over the public rights."
It is Lincoln's teaching, however, that there are certain ambitions
which cannot be counteracted by ambition, that there are
circumstances, far from remote in their probability, in which there
would be such a division of private interests as practically to
nullify these interests as sentinels over public rights. Such dangers,
according to Lincoln, can only be confronted by a mighty resolve
which has no private motive. There must be a people capable,
in the last resort, of sacrificing every conscious private interest
and leaders capable of sacrificing every conscious ambition.

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Lincoln would grant that it is foolish to rely upon men's virtue
when it is possible to prompt them by self-interest. But he would
say that it is worse than foolish to think that self-interest can be
the ultimate reliance of republican freedom. For men claiming
republican freedom the right to self-government, a right whose
very name is a synonym for virtue cannot doubt that they must
vindicate their claim by their virtue, when the supreme test
comes.

Lincoln's prophetic account of the coming crisis begins with a
question. Why should we, after fifty years, suppose any danger
different from those already faced and overcome? The answer is
that "There are now, and will hereafter be, many causes, danger-
ous in their tendency, which have not existed heretofore . . ."

That our government should have been maintained in its
original form from its establishment until now, is not much
to be wondered at. It had many props to support it through
that period, which now are decayed, and crumbled away.
Through that period, it was felt by all, to be an undecided
experiment; now, it is understood to be a successful one.
Then, all that sought celebrity and fame, and distinction,
expected to find them in the success of that experiment.
Their cH was staked upon it: their destiny was inseparably
linked with it Their ambition aspired to display before an
admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a
proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no
better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people
to govern themselves* If they succeeded, they were to be
immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties
and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and
sung, and toasted through all time. If they failed, they were
to be called knaves and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting
hour; then to be sunk and forgotten. They succeeded. The
experiment is successful; and thousands have won thek
deathless names in making it so.

It may be observed that the argument concerning the mainte-
nance of the government applies with equal force to its estab-
lishment, although this is not said explicitly at this point. What
ambition is here said to aspire to applies to the entire work of
the generation of the Founding Fathers and most especially to
the Fathers themselves. And now we are confronted with another

206 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

of those rhetorical reversals which, like the earlier justification
of lynchings by "abstract" and "correct" reasoning, although it
barely ripples the flow of conventional sentiments upon the
surface, shows a startling detachment not far below. And in this
case our shock may prove a good deal more severe. For there
appears to be a systematic process of detraction of the Fathers
that borders upon the savage. Their heroic deeds, deeds whose
heroism no one celebrated more resoundingly than Lincoln
himself, we are here told, are "not much to be wondered at."
Their work was not nearly so difficult as it has been supposed,
because it had "many props to support it" then. A little later
on Lincoln elaborates this theme as follows:

By this ("the powerful influence which the interesting scenes
of the revolution had upon the passions of the people as
distinguished from their judgment") the jealousy, envy, and
avarice, incident to our nature . . . were, for the time, in a
great measure smothered and rendered inactive; while the
deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of
revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were
directed exclusively against the British nation. And thus,
from the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our
nature were either made to lie dormant, or to become the
active agents in the advancement of the noblest causethat
of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty.

That the Fathers were in a position to employ and did employ
"the basest principles of our nature" for the "noblest cause," while
it may detract somewhat from the magnitude of their accomplish-
ment and is a reflection upon the people they led, is no moral
reflection upon them. But such reflections are not long to be sup-
pressed. Lincoln echoes Hamilton, in the seventy-second Fed-
eralist, who spoke of "love of fame, the ruling passion [the precise
expression used later by Lincoln] of the noblest minds." However,
Lincoln questions the nobility of those who have fame as a ruling
passion, because the beneficence of passion, as such, cannot be
taken for granted. We shall see Lincoln develop the thesis that
love of fame is, in itself, morally neutral, that it was once the
friend of the "noblest cause" purely because of circumstances, and
that, equally because of circumstances, it is now the enemy of
that same cause. The fame of individuals (as distinct from that of
nations), which is here considered, is essentially a private good,

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 207

conceived as being enjoyed by those whose names are immortal-
ized. This private good was, as noted, not only compatible with
the public good in the lifetime of the Fathers but absolutely
required it then. But whether the Fathers sought the good for
the sake of fame, or fame for the sake of the good, we cannot
say. Hence we cannot say that they were virtuous men. Yet this
is not all. Lincoln said at the beginning of the speech that the
Fathers were "hardy, brave, and patriotic," that they performed
their task "nobly." But one does not think of noble deeds as being
undertaken solely or mainly for the doers' own benefit Yet here
he attributes to them no motive other than "celebrity, fame, and
distinction." This was to be gained by "success," upon which their
"alT was staked and with which their destiny was "inseparably"
linked (Lincoln's italics). According to this eschatology, success
gains the heaven of praise and immortality and failure the hell
of execration and oblivion. Let us compare this notion of reward
and punishment with the ending of the Sub-Treasury speech,
December 26, 1839: Thinking of what might give his soul a
dignity "not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect," Lincoln
pictures himself defending his country's cause alone. He there-
upon swears, "Without contemplating consequences . . . eternal
fidelity to the just cause. Let none falter," he continues in accents
that were to resound in 1858 and 1860, "who thinks he is right,
and we may succeed. But," he concludes, "if after all, we shall
fail, be it so. We still shall have the proud consolation of saying
to our consciences, and to the departed shade of our country's
freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment, and adored
of our hearts . . . we never faltered in defending." In the 1839
speech Lincoln says that the choice of a cause of ends as distinct
from means is made by a soul worthy of its eternal artificer,
without regard to consequences; i.e., without regard to the
chances of success or failure. In the eternity from which the soul
emanates, success or failure has nothing to do with reputation
in this world. For such a soul there is a different seat of judgment
than that of the highly unstable source of reputations which allots
political fame. In the 1838 speech he contrasts the passions of
the people with their judgment; he shows that the passions of
people and leaders supported the popular cause, but he does
not say that the judgment of the leaders, any more than that of
the people, supported that cause. This contrast does not suggest
any intimation in the 1838 speech that the leaders of the Revolu-

208 FOLmCAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

tion had that dignity which in 1839 ^e claims for himself, of hav-
ing first submitted his cause to the judgment seat of conscience,
of an unseen but all-seeing judge, without whose approval all
other approval is valueless and in the light of whose approval all
condemnation is but vindication. Finally, in the 1839 speech Lin-
coln says that the just cause must be adored in the heart. Here
alone is a passion which is good in itself because it is, by definition,
a passion caused by what is good in itself; it is a passion which
expresses itself not in self-reflecting contemplation but in the
self-abnegation of adoration. It is the soul's link, as the invocation
of the 1839 peroration shows, not with the spurious immortality
of human opinions, but with eternity. Such a passion, while it
compels men to hold political fame in contempt, alone makes
them worthy of the greatest fame. Of such judgment, passion,
and dignity in the Fathers, Lincoln gives no hint in the Lyceum
speech. While he positively asserts nothing incompatible with
such higher dignity, he more than suggests that we ought not
to give them the benefit of doubt. For does he not say, almost
in the same breath, that while they aspired to be admired by
the world i.e., wondered af their success is not much to be
wondered at?

There is still further irony in the fact that Lincoln attributes
the demonstration of the proposition that the people are capable
of governing themselves not to the people but to those relatively
small numbers who aspire to fame. It is true that Lincoln here
speaks of "thousands" winning "deathless names/' which would
probably include all the local heroes in the far-flung regions in
which the Revolutionary struggles took place. Yet as the passage
continues Lincoln reveals that his true subject is not the glory
shared by thousands for, as Hobbes says, "glory is like honor, if
all men have it, no man hath it" but the distinction which brooks
no equality, no rivalry. As we shall see, Lincoln was quite con-
vinced that the decisive factor in the great political equations
is "towering genius" of the caliber of Washington and Jefferson
or of Caesar and Napoleon. It is they, above all, who demonstrate
the capacity or incapacity of "the people" to govern themselves.
Yet Lincoln here tells us that the people led by Washington
co-operated with him in very large measure because of "the basest
principles of our nature," while Washington himself may have
been animated primarily by the hope of a personal gain, a gain
which he neither shared with anyone else nor which could be

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 20Q

regarded as a result of the processes of popular government. Thus
he may have had little love for or interest in popular government,
except as it was incidentally necessary to his own fame. In short,
Lincoln tells us there is no real reason to suppose that "our
fathers," whether as leaders or followers, were sincerely devoted
to the cause they have bequeathed to usl If the true test of self-
government is a test of the ability of reason to control passion, a
test of the fidelity of a people and their chosen leaders to the
rights entrusted to them by the nature of popular government,
then there is no reason to believe that such a test has yet occurred.
The capability of a people to govern itself has not yet been
demonstrated!

How are we to interpret these amazing and dramatic reversals
of what have always seemed to be Lincoln's deepest convictions,
as well as the explicit theses of this very speech? Provisionally
we would make these suggestions. First, the reversals occur only
upon analysis, and the surface of the speech does not disturb
the conventional picture of the heroic character of the Revolution.
Second, throughout these central passages, which we have not
yet followed to their end, Lincoln warns against the danger now
of overweening ambition, of the ambition of the man who cannot
bear to share a place in glory's sun, who would build if he can
but tear down if he must. But before Lincoln's warning is made
fully explicit, he gives a demonstration more convincing than any
mere exhortation to beware of the ambitious man. He enacts the
role of such a man before our eyes, showing how the board of
honor might be swept clean by one whose talent and audacity
might crop the honors on the crest even of a Washington to make
a garland for his own head. Yet does Lincoln not, at the same
time, indicate still more how vain is mere political reputation?
Does he not show (Horn soit qui mal y pense] that malicious
speculation upon the motives of men can sully the fame of the
clearest judgments and the most disinterested hearts, that the ex-
trinsic good of fame is only the lure or bait that wise men use to
lead great souls in their formative years to taste the good that is
intrinsically rewarding and which supersedes and displaces the
appetite for fame? In the long run, we may even conclude, those
who have chosen the intrinsically just cause, the cause approved
of their judgment and adored in their hearts, will be recognized
and hailed by those other men, of whatever time or place, who
succeed them in the pilgrimage to the temple of liberty. It is

21O POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

the contemplation of such approbation which alone can truly
gratify the highest human type.

The passage of the Lyceum speech describing the "success"
of the experiment of self-government continues thus:

But the game is caught; and I believe it is true, that with
the catching, end the pleasures of the chase. This field of
glory is harvested, and the crop is akeady appropriated. But
new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is
to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to
suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue
to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as
naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as
others have so done before them. The question then is, can
that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an
edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it
cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for
any task they undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition
would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a guber-
natorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the
family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. WhatI think you
these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a
Napoleon? Neverl Towering genius disdains a beaten path.
It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction
in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame,
erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory
enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the
footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts
and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it,
whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving
freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man
possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition suffi-
cient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring
up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the
people to be united with each other, attached to the govern-
ment and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully
frustrate his designs.

Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he
would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good
as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 211

to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly
to the task of pulling down.

Here then, is a probable case, highly dangerous, and such
a one as could not have well existed heretofore.

At the point at which Lincoln prepares his question, as to whether
the men of heroic mold can find gratification within the framework
of institutions erected by others, Edmund Wilson, in the essay
referred to above, interjects the following comment: "You may
think that the young Lincoln is about to exhort his auditors to
follow the example of their fathers, not to rest on the performance
of the past but to go on to new labors of patriotism, but the
speech takes an unexpected turn ... He has been, it seems,
preparing to deliver a warning." 11 The speech does take an
unexpected turn, but the warning is its least unexpected and
certainly its least unorthodox aspect. For in these sentences we
find the future author of the Gettysburg Address denying, in a
wholly relevant sense, that all men are created equal!

Let us first be clear as to the meaning of the famous proposition.
Although it has given rise to countless differing interpretations,
yet does it not indisputably mean that the government of man
by man, unlike the government of beasts by man, is not founded
in any natural difference between rulers and ruled? Any man
is by nature the ruler ( actual or potential ) of any dog, for example.
As Jefferson was fond of saying, and Lincoln sometimes echoed,
some men are not born with saddles on their backs to be ridden
and others with spurs to ride them. The government of man over
other species is rooted in a natural difference, but political
government cannot be traced to any such difference. The govern-
ment of men may be based upon force or fraud, in which case it
is illegitimate, or it may be based upon consent. Such is assuredly
the irreducible meaning of the Declaration of Independence, and
no one has ever been more sensitive to it or to all the changes
that could be rung upon it than Lincoln. Yet Lincoln here tells
us that there are men whose genius for and will to domination
virtually makes them a species apart. They belong to "the family
of the lion and the tribe of the eagle." Even as it is natural and
rational for men who are equal to seek in consent the basis of
political rule, so is it natural (and rational) for men who are
surpassingly superior to seek in the unfettered acknowledgment
of their superiority the basis of such rule. Such men, therefore,

212 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

are the born enemies of any political institutions which they are
not by law destined to rule, but most especially are they the
enemies of republics, as is implied in the examples Lincoln gives
of the world's most famous destroyers of republics. Lincoln does
not even entertain the possibility of taming or accommodating
such natures, or "rehabilitating" them, in the modern parlance.
What he says is far more suggestive of ancient than modern
thinking. For example, there is the following passage from Plato's
dialogue Gorgias, spoken by a character named Callicles, who is
a follower of the teacher of oratory for whom the dialogue is
named and who holds the view Lincoln appears to attribute to
the Caesar-type:

. . . the makers of laws are the majority, who are weak; and
they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a
view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify
the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the
better of them, in order that they may not get the better
of them; and they say, that dishonesty is shameful and
unjust; meaning, by the word injustice, the desire of a man
to have more than his neighbors; for knowing their own
inferiority, I suspect they are too glad of equality . . . whereas
nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have
more than the worse, die more powerful than the weaker
. . . Nay but these are the men [i.e., tyrants and conquerors]
who act according to nature; yes, by Zeus, and according
to the law of nature: not, perhaps, according to that artificial
law, which we invent and impose upon our fellows, of whom
we take the best and strongest from their youth upwards,
and tame them like young lions,charming them with the
sound of the voice, and saying to them, that with equality
they must be content, and that the equal is honorable and
just. But if there were a man with sufficient force, he would
shake and break through, and escape from all this; he would
trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms,
and all our laws which are against nature: the slave would
rise in rebellion and be lord over us, and the light of natural
justice would shine forth. 12

According to Callicles, a government founded upon a doctrine
of equal human rights is a lie, a myth imposed upon the stronger
by the weaker, in order to deprive them of the just share to

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 213

which they would be entitled by their strength. Callicles also,
like Lincoln, distinguishes between the stronger natures who may
be satisfied by the conventional honors bestowed by the weaker,
on the basis of their morality of weakness, who might be
"charmed" with a presidential chair, and those true 'lions," the
Ubermenschen, whose strength includes the intellectual penetra-
tion of the spurious quality of such pleasures and the consequent
refusal to accept them. Such men will not accept the highest
honor in the gift of a society of equals because they cannot
indeed honestly cannot acknowledge a right in their inferiors to
grant as a gift what they have a leonine right to claim as their own.
To speak of these men as immoral is a mistake, for they do not
recognize any obligation to what is commonly called morality.
All such obligations are predicated upon an equality whose truth
they deny. If their superiority is real, as Lincoln no less than
Callicles appears to affirm, then morality must in fact consist in
whatever vindicates their superiority. The Declaration of Inde-
pendence affirms the natural equality of men and conceives
political obligation in the light of that equality. But by equal
reason obligation must correspond to inequality if men are as
naturally unequal as they are here asserted to be. Now we are
confronted with the most acute problem of the Lyceum Address:
Did Lincoln seriously believe in the existence of men so superior
that their submission to "equal" men was a violation of natural
right? Is there not a strong presumption in favor of an affirmative
answer to this question in the fact that Lincoln does not, in his
warning against this alleged type, propose any alternative gratifi-
cation for that ruling passion which he foresees engendered by
Caesarian natures? He says that the true Caesarian, who will
assuredly arise, "would as willingly, perhaps more so/' do good
as evil. But Lincoln does not, as we might expect, propose any
good for him to do. If, in fact, no good exists which is both
adequate to the fulfillment of his nature and consistent with
republican freedom, then it would follow that republican freedom
cannot long endure. It cannot because it is in a decisive sense
against nature, because it is in a decisive sense unjust. We must
then inquire, above all, whether Lincoln does not show us, in
the perpetuation of a republic based upon equal rights, a task
equal to or surpassing in glory what future Caesars might find
in the ruins of a republic.
We have previously noted Edmund Wilson's observation that

14 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

Lincoln described his heroic destroyer "with a fire that seemed
to derive as much from admiration as apprehension." May this
not be due in part to the fact that the vision of a man who, by
force of his own qualities, seizes what is rightfully his own is
always admirable? Is this additional evidence that Lincoln really
accepted the truth of the proposition that some men are by nature
the rulers of others? Before attempting an answer we would
produce another ancient parallel to this passage in the Lyceum
speech from Aristotle's Politics:

If ... there be some one person, or more than one, al-
though not enough to make up the full complement of a
state, whose virtue is so pre-eminent that the virtues or
political capacity of all the rest admit of no comparison with
his or theirs, he or they can be no longer regarded as part
of a state; for justice will not be done to the superior, if he is
reckoned only as the equal of those who are so far inferior
to him in virtue and in political capacity. Such a one may
truly be deemed a god among men. Hence we see that
legislation is necessarily concerned only with those who are
equal in birth and capacity; and that for men of pre-eminent
virtue there is no law they are themselves a law. Anyone
would be ridiculous who attempted to make laws for them:
they would probably retort what, in the fable of Antisthenes,
the lions said to the hares, when in the council of the beasts
the latter began haranguing and claiming equality for all
(*Where are your claws and teeth?!'). And for this reason
democratic states have instituted ostracism; equality is above
all things their aim, and therefore they ostracised and ban-
ished from the city for a time those who seemed to pre-
dominate too much . . , 18

In his comment on Lincoln's ambiguous attitude toward his
dangerous hero Wilson also says "it is evident that Lincoln has
projected himself into the role against which he is warning . . ."
We believe this is true, in the sense that Lincoln envisioned him-
self playing the highest political role. But we do not believe he
envisioned himself as the destroyer, except in so far as every
true strategist imagines himself in the position of his enemy. The
warning against Caesar is sincere, and its sincerity is rooted in
Lincoln's conception, in the same sense as Aristotle's, of a political
role transcending that of Caesar and opposed to Caesar. The

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 215

guarantee of his sincerity is his conviction that the man who can
play such a role possesses a ruling passion of greater magnitude
and may achieve greater glory than Caesar. There is evidence
of such a role in Lincoln's simple exhortation to the people to
remain united, faithful to the government and laws, and watchful
against the destroyer. Yet this advice in itself is purely perfunc-
tory. It is not for the people, but for their leaders, to penetrate
the disguises in which their enemies come. Lincoln knew that both
Caesar and Napoleon had overthrown republics by posing as their
defenders, preserving republican forms until there was no power
in the republics to resist them.

You all did see, that on the Lupercall,
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?

Anthony's rhetorical question may be answered as the crowd
answered it, but we know that Anthony himself answered it dif-
ferently. But the antithesis to Caesar is not, as Mr. Wilson appears
to suppose, Brutus. For Brutusat least Shakespeare's Brutus
although a man of purest intentions, was a guileless bungler. It
was Cassius who possessed the wisdom of the serpent, who would
have murdered Anthony instead of allowing him to speak at
Caesar's funeral. The man who would be a match for Caesar must
somehow combine the virtues and political capacity of which
Aristotle speaks; he must somehow unite, in his single person, the
goodness of Brutus and the wiliness of Cassius. 14 Because these
qualities were divided in Caesar's enemies they were impotent
against Caesar, who was mightier in death, as Brutus found at
Philippi, than in life. The conspiracy ended in civil war and the
destruction of the conspirators, but the regime founded by Caesar
was re-established more firmly than ever.

It is the Calliclean thesis that the passion for domination of the
natural ruler cannot brook submission to a regime of equal rights.
But the Calliclean thesis is not pushed far enough by its advocates.
For the passion it celebrates cannot be gratified by victory over
the weaker, for whom the strong man has such contempt. Callicles
demonstrates the contempt that the strong man has for the
opinions of the weak, as represented by their opinions of justice.
But what of the Caesarian reputation, which is founded in the
adulation of these selfsame weaklings?

2l6 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

And then he offered ft the third time; he put it the third
time by, and still he refus'd it, the rabblement shouted, and
clapp'd their chopp'd hands, and threw up their sweaty night
caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath, because
Caesar refus'd the crown, that ft had almost chok'd Cae-
sar ...

Does not a really strong man despise glory founded in such praise
or in any praise founded in the mental, moral, or physical
infirmity of those who give it? A Harry Monmouth seeks out a
Harry Percy upon the field of Shrewsbury. The measure of a lion
or eagle can be taken only against other lions or eagles; the victor
in such a contest compels admiration whether he seeks it or not.
Callicles and Aristotle agree in the doctrine that the man of
superlative virtue is not subject to the laws of "equals" i.e., of
inferiors but that he is a law unto himself. But Callicles again
fails to take the measure of his own thesis by assuming a
qualitative similarity in the superior and inferior men, believing
that the superior have the same pleasures as the inferior and differ
only in their ability to gratify themselves. This is the same fallacy
which Lincoln imputes both to the Fathers and to the Caesar type;
it may also have been the fallacy of Hamilton when he said that
love of fame was the ruling passion of the noblest minds. Lincoln,
like Aristotle (and Plato), holds that the fame achievable by po-
litical success is the greatest good from the popular point of view,
but it is not absolutely the greatest good. The folly of placing
the highest human aspiration in political immortality Lincoln has
subtly demonstrated by showing how the most apparently secure
of all fame, that of the Fathers, might be annihilated. As the pero-
ration of the Sub-Treasury speech indicated, there must then be
a good beyond political fame, which replaces the appetite for
fame, in the highest human type. But the appetite for this higher
good makes the highest type man self -controlled with respect to
all those appetites which the law forbids us to indulge, except in
a moderate or "equal" fashion. Just as the athlete who has a con-
suming passion for victory in an Olympic game forgoes of his own
will many of the pleasures of other men, so this highest type man
is controlled by his passion for a greater good. He is, as Aristotle
says, above the law, because there is that in him which more than
fulfills the law's requirements without either fear of the law's
punishments or desire of the law's rewards. Such a man, Aristotle

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION

says, is like a god as compared to other men. This assertion has
a very precise meaning. When we see the would-be Olympic
victor abjuring the pleasures of other men, we do not, in any pro-
found sense, wonder at his self-denial. Neither do we wonder at
the honesty of the banker, the piety of the preacher, or the
affability of the politician. Wonder is the offspring of mystery, and
these instances present no mystery. The Roman mob was struck
with amazement when Caesar thrice put by the kingly crown, be-
cause it could not comprehend how a man who might have had
a crown should deny it to himself. Yet it was not in the least
wonderful to Casca, who knew perfectly well why Caesar had
refused it. Within the political horizon, political success, above all
that "immortality" conferred by the highest political success,
which preserves a man's memory in honor "to the latest genera-
tion," appears as the ruling passion of the noblest minds. But for
a man to have such glory within his grasp and yet not to seize it
must appear supremely wonderful to those whose vision is
bounded by the political horizon. What greater good can there
be to which this might be subordinated? To those who regard
the political good as the highest good, anyone who can act as if
there is a greater good must be more than a man. In this sense
he must be a god. Lincoln's conception of the highest political
role fits the Aristotelian conception of the man of godlike virtue.
For the antithesis to the Caesarian destroyer of republics is, as
we have maintained, one who is greater than Caesar, who is,
therefore, the savior of republics. Political salvation, it would
appear, like the salvation of the individual soul, cannot be
achieved without superhuman or divine virtue.

The man of godlike virtue, said Aristotle, is no proper part of
a political community. This is true because, as we have just ob-
served, the law which is rooted in the requirement to check the
grasping passions of men, to enable them to live peaceably to-
gether, has nothing to control in him. But further: such a man
is said also to possess Caesarian power, to be able to overthrow
the law; and even though he does not do so, the fact of his ability
means that there is no element of submission in his attitude
toward the law. The laws are not for him, yet there is no tension
between the requirements of his well-being and the continued
existence of the law for the simple reason that he has no desire
for those things with respect to which the law lays constraints.

2l8 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

But why should his attitude not be that of indifference instead
of that of the protector? In one of Lincoln's great wartime
utterances the true statesman is likened to a shepherd protecting
his flock. He differs from the wolf, not because he is inferior in
power to injure the sheep, but because he chooses to protect them.
But why does the shepherd abstain from inflicting injury? Is he
not merely a disguised wolf, who will eventually sacrifice the
sheep to his own gain even more thoroughly than the wolf?
Lincoln's answer to this, it is plain, is that the figure of the shep-
herd is only a similitude under which the human mind conceives
of the divine nature. Lincoln's shepherd is like the shepherd of
David's psalms and Isaiah's prophecies. 15 When the sheep see the
shepherd slay the wolf, their adulation is not founded only in
self-interest; it is genuine admiration of the shepherd's strength.
But the cause of this admiration, the sense of wonder at the shep-
herd's might, comes not only from the sense of his strength. The
strength of the wolf inspires terror, yet there is nothing wonderful
about it because it is joined to the wolf's predatory nature. Indeed,
if the sheep are, as Callicles suggests, themselves entirely selfish,
the gentleness of the shepherd would be all the more incompre-
hensible. It is the contrast between the shepherd's gentleness and
his strength, and the mystery of why he denies himself "human"
i.e., selfish gratification, that arouses wonder. It is this imitatio
Dei which creates a glory exceeding anything awarded for politi-
cal success. Such a glory may, in fact, exceed any merely political
glory, even on the political level. Yet it is understood that the
actual achievement of such glory is incidental or accidental; the
political savior is capable of being the savior only because he has
no wish to see the thing he can save endangered. The Lord had
no wish to see man sin; the divine nature offered man salvation
nonetheless; yet it is inconceivable, or at least inconsistent with
the idea of the divine nature, that God needed glorification as
man needed salvation. Lincoln had a corresponding conception of
the nature of the true statesman in the highest sense. He alone
can save his country who can forgo the honors of his countrymen.
Like Aristotle's great-souled man, described in the Nicomachean
Ethics, he alone is worthy of the highest honor who holds honor
itself in contempt, who prefers even to the voice of his country-
men the approving voice heard only by himself, "Well done,
thou good and faithful servant." That the question of the measure

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 219

of the man who might live up to this standard was involved in
Lincoln's mind from the beginning to the end of his contest with
Douglas is shown by Lincoln's last speech in the 1858 campaign:

Ambition has been ascribed to me. God knows how sincerely
I prayed from the first that this field of ambition might not
be opened. I claim no insensibility to political honors; but
today could the Missouri restriction be restored, and the
whole slavery question replaced on the old ground of "tolera-
tion" by necessity where it exists, with unyielding hostility
to the spread of it, on principle, I would, in consideration,
gladly agree, that Judge Douglas should never be out, and I
never in, an office, so long as we both or either, live. 18

There is in this passage something of a suggestion that there is
no place in democratic politics for the man who would act only
on the grand scale, in the great crises. Such a suggestion is, of
course, belied by Lincoln's life and by his obvious relish for the
ways, low as well as high, of the politician. Yet there is a sense
in which Lincoln's career bears out this aristocratic interpretation.
For Lincoln, like Aristotle's great-souled man, who is a man of
few but great actions, seems to have concentrated his whole inner
life upon preparing for the crisis foretold in the Lyceum speech.
Lincoln, unlike Douglas, found himself unable to play anything
but a minor political role throughout the agitation caused by the
Wilmot Proviso. And he accepted the leadership of Clay and of
Douglas himself as Whigs and Democrats joined hands in the
Compromise of i8so. 17 The arts that he learned in his political
apprenticeship were not learned for the sake of moving the state
capital from Vandalia to Springfield, Senator Beveridge to the
contrary notwithstanding. When Woodrow Wilson said that
the phenomenon of Lincoln had made it possible to believe in
democracy, he implied that great moral restraint was traditionally
associated with aristocratic virtue and had always seemed particu-
larly incompatible with deference to popular opinion. It was
Lincoln's task to demonstrate how magnanimity might find its
lodgment with the cause of the people.

There is yet another sense in which the man of surpassing merit
is not part of a political community, in which sense also Lincoln
is in agreement with Aristotle. Let us think first of the role of
the founder as distinct from that of the savior. It is the task of
a Moses, a Lycurgus, a Romulus, or a Washington to give an

22O POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

impress to the political order he founds, even as the sculptor gives
form to the statue. To do so implies, as in the case of the artisan,
a separation and detachment of the worker from his work. The
founder, qua founder, is then never a part of the order he founds.
In a somewhat different sense this is true of the entire founding
(or Revolutionary) generation. They are not bred under the law
of the republic they help to found; they are never so thoroughly
molded by it in their inner beings as those who come after them.
This relationship, we should observe, is also indicated in the story
of Exodus by the fact that those whom Moses led out of Egypt,
like Moses himself, were not permitted to enter the Promised
Land. Only their children, bred under Mosaic law, entered it. Lin-
coln's argument in the Lyceum speech parallels the Bible, in that
he imputes to the Revolutionary generation, in particular the
leaders, passionate personal motives for attachment to the new
order, motives which betoken inferiority to the attachment which
is habitual and which flows from a character disposed from within
to choose rightly, without any supervening direction by the pas-
sions. Hatred of the Egyptians led to independence, but not
hatred of Egypt, but love of Israel, must perpetuate Israel. Love
of Israel must come from reverence of the Law, from those bred
by the Law, in whom the Law has been implanted from birth
and grown with their growth.

And yet there is another viewpoint, from which posterity is in-
ferior to the founding generation. When Lincoln states the case
against the Fathers, by maintaining that the passion for "fame,
celebrity, and distinction" gave adventitious support to their
cause, he was deliberately shaping the argument to focus atten-
tion upon the Caesarian destroyer. But the "detachment" of the
Founders may certainly be viewed in a more inspiring light. They
were compelled to take great risks for their cause, as Lincoln
indicates. But while it is true that, as he says, their destinies were
inseparably linked with the maintenance of republican institu-
tions, they were not linked with their establishment except by
their own deliberate choice. They incurred the risks by choosing
their cause. Washington and Jefferson might have stood high in
the service of King George III, as Moses might have continued
to do in the service of Pharaoh. The detachment of the Founders
enables them to see the republic in a light in which it does not
appear to posterity. Those bred by the law are bred to affirm
republican principles, not as a matter of deliberative choice, but

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 221

spontaneously, as an immediate consequence of their republican
natures. But the founder must reject much of what he has been
bred to believe. He sees the republic as an alternative, and his
affirmation is a triumph of the republican cause over all the
alternatives he rejects. Moreover, the glory of Washington, for ex-
ample, like that of Moses, is that of a founder of an order which
holds out a unique promise of good to the entire family of man,
a good which mankind has always desired but has never known
to be possible. All the weary experience of the past is against
such men; the boundlessness of die infamy which surrounds the
prospect of failure on their lonely pinnacles of largely unshared
responsibility is unimaginably terrible. They do not have the com-
forting assurances of communal conviction because the com-
munity which would shelter their assurance exists only in their
own vision of the future. Meanwhile they must bear the re-
proaches of those who yearn for the fleshpots of Egypt or watch
the summer soldiers depart as winter closes over Valley Forge.
Such a founder comprehends the affirmation of his decision in all
its terror, majesty, and solitude. He thus estimates the value of
the thing to which he would give life as perhaps no one again
will estimate it. For such a man alone knows what it is to affirm
its value while all the alternatives he has rejected crowd around
him, beckoning him from the uncharted voyage to the easier,
safer, and conventional paths.

Let us consider the consequences of the foregoing reflections as
they bear upon the nature and role of the would-be preserver.
The principal danger to the republic comes, according to Lincoln,
from the Caesarian type. Men of this type are of the same order
of genius as the Founders, in that they too do not savor what
they deem to be conventional pleasures. Although bred by the
law, they do not see it as other citizens do; they shake off their
loyalty as if it were a dream or mirage and see it as the Founders
did, as an alternativeand an opportunity. Yet in the last analysis
Caesar is a victim of the delusion he thinks he has thrown off.
For the ambition which he chooses to gratify, the ambition for
fame, we have seen to be but a conventional pleasure trans-
figured. But the antagonist of Caesar, no less than Caesar, must
comprehend the republic as an alternative: an alternative to be
chosen or to become the mere instrument of his own ambition.
The sense in which the founder stands outside the order he

222 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

founds is fairly obvious, but it is no less true that its preserver
must stand outside it He too must know, nay, he must feel, all
the reasons which might wrench him from his republican loyalty.
The qualifications of a savior, whether of the individual soul or
of the political soul of a free nation, require a temptation in the
wilderness. The savior must know all the attractions of becoming
the destroyer before he can become the savior. It is no accident
that the Lyceum speech, whose highest theme is political salva-
tion, ends by saying that the "proud fabric of freedom" may yet
rest upon a "rock," and that if it does, "as truly as has been said of
the only greater institution, 'the gates of hell shall not prevail
against it/"

Lincoln's deliberate invocation of the analogies with the New
and Old Testaments indicates that the trials of the faith of the
forefathers must be reduplicated by their subseqeunt political
savior. And Lincoln has methodically indicated the nature of the
trials by indicating the gravest grounds for the gravest doubts
of the most sacred tenets of the citizens' creed: the moral and
intellectual eminence of the Founding Fathers, the heroic char-
acter of the Revolution, and, above all, the proposition that all
men are created equal. Lincoln has shown that these things were
not matters of unquestioning faith for him but subjects of extreme
and anxious doubt. Yet Lincoln has not only indicated his doubts
but his triumph over them. All men are created equal, because
those who are really superior are in the decisive sense above
humanity. For them to claim superior rights would be absurd,
because such a claim would imply an appetite for those political
goods for which they have no desire, "All men are created equal"
remains the decisive political truth, because those who might with
justice deny it have no motive to deny it, while those who do
deny it can only do so because of an unjust motive.

That the Founding Fathers were truly a heroic breed we have
also suggested must have been Lincoln's serious final conviction.
This may be stated decisively when we point out that Lincoln
has really shown that the situation of the Founder is reproduced,
in all its essentials, in the situation of the preserver. The passage
on the Caesarian menace concluded by saying that this danger is
one which could not have existed before. If this is true, then it
follows that a unique task exists now, even as one existed in the
revolutionary era. And since Lincoln correlates the opportunity for
glory with uniqueness, the opportunity for glory still exists. But

TEACHING: POLmCAL SALVATION 223

now we see that the passion which merits true glory is not a
passion for glory. We understand that both founder and preserver
must transcend mere ambition. The heroic character of the
Fathers is re-established by the same considerations that point to
the savior, as distinguished from the destroyer.

Yet the task of the savior differs from, and is in crucial respects
more noble because it is more difficult than, the task of the original
Founders. It was no expression of a transient mood that led Lin-
coln to say, as he left Springfield to take the nation's helm on
February 11, 1861, that he went "with a task before me greater
than that which rested upon Washington." The original founder
leads a fight against avowed enemies of republican freedom in
Washington's time against a largely alien foe. The Caesarian
danger is an inner danger, arising mainly from the coincidence of
vaulting ambition and mob violence. 18 But mob violence is pecul-
iarly dangerous to popular government when it is as Lincoln
clearly believed it was an expression of the impatience of the
people, intoxicated with the idea that they are the source of all
legitimate power. For intoxication with their own supremacy may
lead to the conviction that the constitutional forms erected to se-
cure their rights are barriers to their rights. The people, in short,
tend to identify their rights with their passions and to oppose
obstacles to their passions as if they were obstacles to their rights.
The Caesarian danger comes when demagogues indulge the peo-
ple in this very delusion. When those who thus flatter the people
become masters of the government, then the forms of law may
themselves become prostituted. Caesar may come into possession
of the government by carefully observing legal requirements
which he means to do away with when his control is secure. Thus
may the substance of popular government, the security of individ-
ual rights, be completely abolished in the name of the people and
the rights of individuals. In his diagnosis of the Caesarian menace
Lincoln is, among other things, expressing a Whig view of
Jacksonian democracy. In our opinion Lincoln did not feel the
repulsion toward Jackson that was official Whig dogma. We
cannot, for example, believe that Lincoln ever shared the Whig
view that Jackson had overextended the powers of the presidency.
Douglas, far more than Jackson, embodied the menace implied
in Jacksonianism. The celebration of "military glory-that attrac-
tive rainbow that rises in showers of blood-that serpent's eye that
charms to destroy/' as he said during the Mexican War, Lincoln

224 POLITICAL, PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

did indeed fear greatly. Such glory, upon which Jackson certainly
capitalized, intoxicated Jackson's followers far more than it
did their chief and, among these, none more than Douglas. As
we have amply seen, all Douglas's policies culminated in a
Catonian cry for the destruction of British power in the New
World. All the disruptive forces in American life would have been
"pacified" by a gigantic crusade against Britain. Yet the message
of the Lyceum speech is that such a policy as Douglas's would
be in effect a confession of defeat for free popular government.
In the passage in the Lyceum speech in which Lincoln says that
the future destroyer will seek distinction "whether at the expense
of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen," he is not thinking
primarily, as Edmund Wilson supposes, of his own future role and
the objections that might be made to it. He is thinking of the
passions of the rival factions at Alton, Illinois, and of the politicians
who would seek votes without regard to the intrinsic Tightness or
wrongness of the methods or the goals of the men in the mobs.
He is thinking, above all, of such a monstrosity as Douglas's
popular sovereignty which was itself but a particular formulation
of Jacksonian democracy and which "didn't care" whether slavery
was voted up or voted down. The doctrine of popular sovereignty
as preached by Douglas was of the essence of the Caesarian
danger; it was a base parody of the principle of popular rights.
It implied that whatever the people wanted they had a right to,
instead of warning the people that the rights which they might
assert against all the kings and princes of the old world were
rights which they must first respect themselves.

Thus we see that, for the republic to live, the act of creation
or founding must be repeated. Indeed, we may go further and
say that Lincoln's argument carried to its logical conclusion re-
quires that the re-creation of the republic is something that may
have to be accomplished at any time and that only as there are
men of transcendent ability and virtue who, in the sense indi-
cated, stand guard outside the community can those within it re-
main in possession of their republican rights. The demonstration
of the "people's" capacity to govern themselves is possible because
of the Washingtons and Jeffersons of the first generation and
because of such men as Lincoln fourscore and seven years after.
The Caesarian danger may arise at any time; it is rooted in the
strength of the passions of the people and in the evil genius of
some men to offer the people the gratification of these passions

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 22$

in forms which are spuriously represented as legitimate exercises
of the people's rights. But Caesar must be encountered by one
who has all Caesar's talent for domination, one who could, if he
would, govern the people without their consent, but who prefers
the people's freedom to their domination. Such statesmanship is
predicated upon the truth that Caesar is, in the last analysis, not
the people's master but their fool. For his own ambition is but
vulgar ambition transfigured; he is capable of enslaving the people
only by first becoming enslaved to their desires. He overthrows
republican self-government by leading the people to foreign con-
quest, bread, and circuses. Those who would teach the people
that they may not eat the bread others have earned, whether
abroad or at home, have a much harder task. Yet they alone
are true masters, they alone have enslaved the people to a noble
enslavement the restraint of their own passions. The true ruler
of men, with the highest of all ambitions, sees in the idea of equal-
ity the principle which requires, both logically and politically, the
highest degree of moral self-government. His own sense of su-
periority can be vindicated only by the knowledge that he has
been responsible whether by the shepherd's silent watchfulness
or his stern and unrelenting encounter with the wolf for the re-
straints which keep his flock in the paths of righteous endeavor.

The work of the Founding Fathers was excellent and noble,
but it was incomplete. Its incompleteness is no necessary reflec-
tion upon the Fathers themselves. In asserting their independence
of the British they could not help appealing to passions of revenge
and hatred; nor could they, in appealing to the principle of equal
rights, avoid setting in train passions which would resist both just
and unjust restraints. The people must be taught, as Jefferson
taught them, to assert their rights. But they had not yet learned
to respect what they had asserted. The people had not yet learned
to be submissive in the presence of their own dignity. That this is
peculiarly difficult to learn is easy to see. Whoever sees the law
as the product of his will-whether it be a Louis XIV or the
American people is prone to think that all things are lawful. Yet
however easy or inevitable the error, it is still an error. Whoever
fulfills the law does not destroy the law. But that the people can
destroy themselves, that they can be led by the Pied Piper of

226 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

Caesarism to their own destruction, was Lincoln's profound con-
viction. For the people to have the respect to which their rights
entitle them they must be made subject to a discipline in virtue
of which they will demand only those things in the name of their
own supreme authority that are reasonable; i.e., consistent with
the implications of their own equal rights. There is only one way
in which this self-respect on the part of the people can, according
to Lincoln, be achieved. The Lyceum speech is designed, as the
whole idea of political salvation implies, to give force to the one
practical proposal of the Lyceum speech; namely, the proposal for
a "political religion." We have noted that the speech ends with a
comparison of the American republic to the "only greater institu-
tion," as we have earlier noted parallels of the Revolutionary
generation to the Israelites led out of Egypt by Moses. We would
now observe that Lincoln's political thought is cast almost wholly
in the metaphor of a double perspective, in which the function
of his statesmanship is seen either on the analogy of the salvation
of Israel from Egypt or the salvation of the world by the Messiah.
Lincoln's moral imagination worked in and through a kind of
conflation of the symbols of Old and New Testaments. It is, for
example, impossible to grasp fully what Lincoln believed he was
doing in his debates with Douglas throughout the period of
1854-60 without seeing it as a performance of a prophetic role in
the Old Testament sense. Neither is it possible to understand his
conception of his Civil War role without seeing the Messianic
idea at work. In discussing "political religion" as presented in the
Lyceum speech, we will go beyond the framework of the speech
itself to show how it involved Lincoln's whole conception of po-
litical salvation and of the role of statesmanship as necessarily
agreeing in its higher reaches with the purposes and methods of
the divine teacher. Because of the importance of its anticipations,
we reproduce the following with all its rhetorical flourishes:

Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well
wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution,
never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the
country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As
the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declara-
tion of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution
and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property,
and his sacred honor;let every man remember that to vio-

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION

late the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and
to tear the charter of his own, and his children's liberty.
Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American
mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap let it
be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be
written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;-let it
be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls,
and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become
the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the
young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all
sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceas-
ingly upon its altars.

We cannot help noticing that here, unlike the Gettysburg
Address, Lincoln calls only for dedication to the legal order, not,
as we might have expected, to the Declaration and the Constitu-
tion and laws. Yet in this difference we are reminded of the
problem from which the Lyceum speech starts: the problem of
disorder arising from base passions, passions set in motion by the
Revolution and hence by the summons to independence. In fact,
the difference between the Lyceum speech and the Gettysburg
Address is more apparent than real. For the latter effects a subtle
but profound change in the doctrine which it adapts (rather than
adopts) from the Declaration of Independence. Throughout the
period of the debates with Douglas, the "prophetic period" of his
career, whose keynote was a return to ancestral ways, Lincoln
constantly referred to the great central tenet as an "ancient faith."
And so, in the Gettysburg Address, what was called a self-evident
truth by Jefferson becomes in Lincoln's rhetoric an inheritance
from "our fathers." This is not to suggest that Lincoln doubted
the evidence for the proposition although we have seen that his
assent was far more complicated than that of "the people" could
well be but that he found its political efficacy, "four score and
seven years" after, to reside more in the fact of its inheritance
than in its accessibility to unassisted human reason. Lincoln trans-
forms a truth open to each man as man into something he shares
in virtue of his partnership in the nation. The truth which, in the
Declaration, gave each man, as an individual, the right to judge
the extent of his obligations to any community in the Gettysburg
Address also imposes an overriding obligation to maintain the in-
tegrity, moral and physical, of that community which is the bearer

228 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

of the truth. The sacrifices both engendered and required by that
truth for the lapses from the faith are, in a sense, due to the
moral strain imposed by its loftiness transforms that nation
dedicated to it from a merely rational and secular one, calculated
to "secure these rights" i,e., the rights of individuals into some-
thing whose value is beyond all calculation. The "people" is no
longer conceived in the Gettysburg Address, as it is in the
Declaration of Independence, as a contractual union of individuals
existing in a present; it is as well a union with ancestors and
with posterity; it is organic and sacramental. For the central
metaphor of the Gettysburg Address is that of birth and rebirth.
And to be born again, to Lincoln and his audience as to any
audience reared in the tradition of a civilization shaped by the
Bible and by Plato's Republic connoted the birth of the spirit as
distinct from the flesh; it meant the birth resulting from the bap-
tism or conversion of the soul. This new birth is not, as we have
said, mere renewal of life but the origin of a higher life. Thus
Lincoln, in the Civil War, above all in the Gettysburg Address
and Second Inaugural, interpreted the war as a kind of blood
price for the baptism of the soul of a people.

When the opportunity came, Lincoln was prepared by long
forethought to shape from the materials of the American tradition
that political religion which in 1838 he had seen to be necessary
for the perpetuation of our political institutions. He found in the
experience of that people two pre-eminent obstacles, or antago-
nisms, whose reconciliation it would be the essential task of that
religion to effect. One was the antagonism between the American
secular and religious traditions and the other the inner conflict,
to which we have adverted, engendered in part by the Declaration
of Independence itself, between the principles of popular govern-
ment and the passions of the people.

We may observe that American civilization was, in a high
degree, formed by the conjunction of two main currents of thought
and conviction. One was the Puritan religious tradition, the other
the secular tradition known in the eighteenth century, and since,
as the Enlightenment. Although accommodations on the popular
and political level were increasingly made as the eighteenth cen-
tury progressed (as in that laughable compromise between
fidelity and infidelity known as Deism), these elements of
American life were largely hostile to each other. The impact of
the French Revolution on America tore away most of the veils of

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION

compromise and exacerbated enmities that had been superficially
smoothed over. Although Jefferson could on occasion use religious
language, he was the lifelong enemy of clerical influences, espe-
cially those emanating from New England. While he repeatedly
exhorted men to the ethic of Christianity as he understood ithe
never concealed his detestation of the theology of its churches.
Such doctrines as those of the Trinity, original sin, predestination,
redemption through faith (not works), etc., he considered relics
of man's barbaric past or sophistries spun by priests to bemuse
men's minds and aid in their own seizure of power. Although
Jefferson is the arch-apostle of religious freedom, there is no ques-
tion but that he hoped and believed the effect of religious free-
dom would be a withering away of credence in all, or nearly all,
revealed theology. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, for
Jefferson, such an attrition of what he was pleased to call super-
stition was essential if men were to claim their natural rights and
republican freedom was to endure. The preamble to the Declara-
tion of Independence invokes not the God of Israel or the persons
of the Trinity but the God of Nature and is wholly a document
of the rationalistic tradition. This God reveals himself, not in
thunder from Sinai, nor through any gift of faith, inspiration, or
private judgment upon sacred scriptures. He reveals himself
through "self-evident" truths; i.e., through the unassisted natural
processes of ratiocination. Lincoln, however, achieved, on the
level of the moral imagination, a synthesis of the elements which
in Jefferson remained antagonistic. He incorporated the truths of
the Declaration of Independence into a sacred and ritual canon,
making them objects of faith as well as of cognition. Through his
interpretation of the Civil War as both a Hebraic and Christian
ritual atonement, this canon was made sacred to the American
people as the Declaration of Independence, of itself, could not
be made. This interpretation did not depend for its conviction
upon the intellectual acknowledgment of the truth alone an
acknowledgment which, of itself, Lincoln in 1838 showed was a
feeble barrier to the passions but upon a passionate and passion-
conquering conviction born of the sense of the awful price ex-
acted by that truth of its votaries. For the experience of the price
paid for infidelity, but which measured the value of fidelity, might
create a presumption in favor of the truths of the Declaration,
which the evidence supplied by reason, apart from such experi-
ence, could never create.

23O POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

Lincoln's conception of a political religion which would create
"reverence for the laws" is first expressed in the Lyceum speech
and is given fulfillment in the unsurpassed beauties of the
Gettysburg Address. The 1863 speech tacitly obscures the rational
foundations of the proposition to which it says the nation was
dedicated. It associates the new birth of freedom with the idea
of the release of the spirit from the bondage of sin, the idea with
which the people were familiar from their ancient revealed reli-
gion. By this very association Lincoln gave the idea of political
freedom, which was so new to the Western world, a sense of the
dignity which is naturally associated only with things that are old.
The connection between venerability and stability is nowhere ex-
pressed more brilliantly than in the forty-ninth number of the
Federalist, which we may with profit reproduce in this context:

If it be true that all governments rest upon opinion, it is
no less true that the strength of opinion, in each individual,
and its practical influence on his conduct, depend much on
the number which he supposes to have entertained the same
opinion. The reason of man, like man himself, is timid and
cautious when left alone, and acquires firmness and confi-
dence in proportion to the number with which it is associated.
When the examples which fortify opinion are ancient as well
as numerous, they are known to have a double effect. In a
nation of philosophers, this consideration ought to be disre-
garded. A reverence for the laws would be sufficiently
inculcated by the voice of enlightened reason. But a nation
of philosophers is as little to be expected as the philosophical
race of kings wished for by Plato. And in every other nation,
the most rational government will not find it a superfluous
advantage to have the prejudices of the community on its
side.

The lapse of the American people from the faith of their fathers,
like that of the people led by Moses, was a lapse from a truth
immediately accessible. Neither the pillar of fire by night, and
the cloud by day, nor the rational self -evidence of human equality,
had the "practical influence" upon the conduct of one or the other
which their missions required of them. The Jews were led out of
Egypt in fulfillment of a promise gained not by their merits but
by those of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So, we have seen, were
the American people foreordained to the blessings of a govern-

TEACHING: POLITICAL SALVATION 231

ment of equal rights by the merits of the Founding Fathers. Yet,
like the Jews who were still corrupt from their sojourn in Egypt,
the American people were not worthy of their mission. By their
infidelity they were destined to sufferings, sufferings from which
they would gain that purity of heart and tenacity of conviction
which neither miracle nor reason, of itself, seems able to implant.

The necessity of a political religion has, as we have seen,
particular meaning within the framework of Lincoln's analysis of
the problem of free popular government. Over and again, in the
debates with Douglas, Lincoln said that in a government like ours
public sentiment is everything, determining what laws and de-
cisions can or cannot be enforced. For here there is no monarch
or ruling class with a will apart from that of the people. Thus
self-control by the people is a particular necessity, and there is,
accordingly, an especial need for that "double effect" spoken of
in the forty-ninth Federalist, that "prejudice" in favor of moral
restraint which comes from reverence for the laws. But reverence
is a species of veneration, and veneration is for things venerable;
i.e., old. A regard for ancient opinions is a peculiar necessity and
a peculiar difficulty for free popular government. For such govern-
ment is, as no one believed more passionately than Lincoln,
founded in the proposition that all men are created equal, but
that proposition implies an equality not only between individuals
but between generations; it is, therefore, peculiarly subversive of
reverence. The Declaration of Independence thus not only ex-
presses the central truth upon which free government is based
but undermines the possibility of reverence which alone can
stabilize government founded upon that truth. As the forty-ninth
Federalist says, such reverence would not be necessary were men
able to be governed by the voice of enlightened reason alone. But
the Federalist warns, as Lincoln warned, that it would be
singularly unenlightened to depend upon that voice as the sole
restraint upon popular passions.

The tension between the truth and the reverence which that
truth undermines is but another expression of the irreconcilability
of passion and reason. We said before that Lincoln sought, in a
political religion, the reconciliation of the hostile elements in the
American secular and religious traditions. We might conveniently
oversimplify that antagonism by saying that one element called
for reverence without reason and the other reason without rever-
ence. Yet neither was politically true or viable without the other.

232 POUTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

In Lincoln's republican theology this tension may be compared
to original sin in the Christian tradition. The idea of political
salvation, as expressed in the Lyceum speech in 1838, points, as
we have observed, to the political savior. Clinton Rossiter, in his
The American Presidency, well says that "Lincoln is the supreme
myth, the richest symbol in the American experience. He is, as
someone has remarked neither irreverently nor sacrilegiously, the
martyred Christ of democracy's passion play/ 1 Many things in Lin-
coln's life, like the accident of his death, may have been fortuitous
or providential but the myth that came to lif e with his passing
was neither. It was the finely wrought consummation, of philo-
sophic insight and a poetic gift, of a Me devoted to the problem
of "the capability of a people to govern themselves."

Analysis of Lincoln's Temperance Address*

A. Present Success of the Temperance Cause (1-18)

I. Celebration of Present Success (1-2)

II. Causes of Present Success: Contrast Between the Old and
New Temperance Champions (3-18)

a. Want of Approachability of Old-School Champions:
Wrong Men (3-4)

1. Their Want of Approachability

a'. Because of Supposed Want of Sympathy

b'. Because of Supposed Want of Disinterestedness

2. The Washingtonians Contrasting:

a'. Sympathy

b'. Disinterestedness

b. Unwisdom of Old-School Champions' Tactics: Wrong
Measures (5-18)

1. Unwisdom of Denunciation (5-16)

a'. Its Impolicy (5-8)
i'. Its Ineffectiveness

a". Because Unsympathetic
b". Because Necessarily Productive of An-
tagonism

2'. The Washingtonians Effectiveness
b'. Its Injustice (9-16)

i'. Drinking Sanctioned by Universal Public
Opinion: Hence Not Unjust
a". Evidence of This Opinion
b' 7 . Interpretation of This Opinion
c". Evaluation of This Opinion
2'. Its Denunciation Inhumane: Hence Unjust
a". Against the Grain of the Altruistic Pas-
sions: Hence Base

b". Against the Grain of the Egotistic Pas-
sions: Hence Foolish

2. Contrasting Wisdom of the Washingtonians (16-18)

B. Causes of Future Success (19-24)

I. The Missionary Work of Reformed Drunkards (19)

II. The Co-operation of Non-Drinkers (20-24)

a. Doubts of the Non-Drinkers As to Benefits of Their Co-
operation (20-22)
i. Doubt of the Benefit of Banishing Drink

234 ANALYSIS OF LINCOLN'S TEMPERANCE ADDRESS

a'. The Doubt

b'. Removal of Doubt: Testimony of "Universal"

Opinion

2, Doubts of Benefit from Non-Drinkers' Taking the
Pledge
a'. First Doubt

i'. Emptiness of the Gesture

2'. Doubt Removed: Moral Example Not an

Empty Gesture
b'. Second Doubt

i'. Moral Example Ineffective

2'. Doubt Removed: Moral Example Extremely

Powerful When Fashionable

b. Fear of the Non-Drinkers of Injury from Their Co-
operation (23-24)

1. Fear: That They Will Identify Themselves With
Drunkards

2. Removal of Fear:

a'. Argument from Christianity: In Taking Pledge,
They Imitate Christ, Who Is Above Them, Not
Drunks, Who Are Below Them
b'. Argument from Reason and Experience: Drunk-
ards As A Class Not Inferior, Hence No Danger
of Demeaning Themselves
C. Relation of Temperance Revolution to '76 (25-30)

I. Comparison of the Two Revolutions As To Misery Inflicted
and Relieved

a. The Political Revolution

1. Its Benefits (25)

a'. Past and Present

i'. Political Freedom Beyond Anything

Achieved Elsewhere
2'. Solved the Problem of Man's Capability to

Govern Himself

b'. Future: The Germ of the Universal Liberty of
Mankind.

2. Its Cost: Famine, Death, and Desolation (26)

b. The Moral Revolution (27)

1. Its Benefit: Superiority of Moral to Political Free-
dom

2. Its Cost: "Widow's Wail" Compared with 'Universal

ANALYSIS OF LINCOLN S TEMPERANCE ADDRESS 235

Song of Gladness"

II. Consequences of the Two Revolutions: Universal Reign
of Reason (28)

III. Glory of the Two Revolutions (29-30)

a. For the Land That Will Be the Birthplace and Cradle
of Both (29)

b. For the Name of Washington (30)

*Note: Numbers in parenthesis correspond to the paragraphs of the
text as printed in the Sangamo Journal, March 25, 1842, and reprinted
in Collected Works, I, pp. 271-79. The paragraphs are not numbered
in the printed text.

Chapter X

The Teaching Concerning Political
Moderation

THE Lyceum speech contains a prognosis, twenty years before
the house divided speech, of a crisis which must be reached and
passed before the capability of a people to govern themselves
might be said to be demonstrated. Lincoln saw the gathering
storm clouds of that crisis in the wave of mob violence sweeping
the country in 1838. His diagnosis of the causes of that violence
showed he did not believe it to be any transient wave of popular
feeling, but a disease endemic to the government inherited from
the Revolution. Certainly his own exhortation to self-restraint
could not have been expected to be even a palliative of such
evils. Such exhortation serves only to indicate the nature of the
role required by him who would administer the true remedy, but
it is clear that the opportunity to apply that remedy lay only in
part in the power of its possessor, llie political savior, like that
other Messiah, must await the fulfillment of prophecies implicit
in the very conception of his own function before he could step
forth.

The Lyceum speech ends by saying that the old "pillars of
the temple of liberty . . . have crumbled away" and the "temple
must fall, unless we ... supply their places with other pillars,
hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason." The pillars of the
first temple, the work of the Revolutionary Fathers, were, alas,
not quarried from a solid substance, and because they were not
the temple did not endure. A second temple must be built, of
rock, which shall last as long as the "only greater institution."
Like that other institution, this one also finds its consummation

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 237

in an apocalyptic vision, when "the last trump shall awaken our
WASHINGTON," to find the republic still free, its soil undese-
crated by a hostile foot, and his name still revered. It is typical
of the many paradoxes of the Lyceum speech that this passionate
summons to passionate rededication is characterized as a plea
for "cold, calculating, unimpassioned reasonl"

We have seen that the work of the Fathers was, in a sense,
predestined to at least temporary failure because of the inner
tension, engendered by the idea of equality, between the people's
rights and the people's duties. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness required institutions of government a to secure these
rights." The people had a sacred duty to maintain a constitution
and laws designed to secure them; but the strength of anarchic
passions in the people was such that it would have been Utopian
to expect mere intellectual recognition of this fact to be sufficient
to produce obedience. Since the first and most successful enter-
prise of the Fathers was to produce disobedience to an ancient
established order, it would have been peculiarly difficult for them
to inculcate reverence. We have already seen that the need for
reverence was well understood by the authors of the Federalist. 1
In the same forty-ninth number, from which we have already
quoted, occurs this further statement of the theme of the Lyceum
speech:

We are to recollect that all the existing constitutions were
formed in the midst of a danger which repressed the passions
most unfriendly to order and concord; of an enthusiastic
confidence of the people in their patriotic leaders, which
stifled the ordinary diversity of opinions on great national
questions; of a universal ardor for new and opposite forms
produced by a universal resentment and indignation against
the ancient government . . . The future situations in which
we must expect to be usually placed, do not present any
equivalent security against the danger which is apprehended.

Although the Federalist presents Lincoln's problem with great
clarity, its fundamental approach to the solution is predicated
on the idea that it is possible to build a political system on the
"policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect
of better motives." 2 Hamilton and Madison thought that somehow
passions might be controlled by the government, while reason
would control the government. 8 "Ambition must be made to

238 POUTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected
with the constitutional rights of the place." 4 Lincoln, we have
seen, denies the ultimate adequacy of this approach affirming
its insufficiency, not its incorrectness because he denies that there
is a constitutional place for the highest ambitions. It is true that
there is a sense in which ambition in Lincoln's scheme still must
counteract ambition. The Messianic ambition must counteract the
Caesarian. But the loyalty which the Constitution must command
must be generated by a nobler vision of excellence than that of
a well-contrived machine. Lincoln's verdict upon a document such
as the Federalist may be inferred from his association, at the
end of the Lyceum speech, of "cold, calculating" reason with
the Last Judgment.

Lincoln's solution involved, as we have seen, an engrafting of
the passion of revealed religion upon the body of secular political
rationalism. How this differed from what the founding generation
attempted may be seen by comparing the cadences of the Gettys-
burg Address not only with the Declaration but with the following
passage of Washington's Farewell Address (upon which both
Hamilton and Madison had collaborated with the author) :

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political
prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports.
In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who
should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happi-
ness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens.
The mere Politician, equally with the pious man ought to
respect and to cherish them . . . Where is the security for
property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious
obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of
investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution
indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained with-
out religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of
refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and
experience forbid us to expect that national morality can
prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

It would be difficult to find a more condensed expression
of Lincolnian doctrine which was at the same time more alien in
tone and feeling to the sense of what Lincoln believed. Wash-
ington's discussion of the utilitarian function of religion and
morality is of a piece with the Federalist's discussion of the

TEACHING: POUmCAL MODERATION 239

mechanical distribution of the powers of government under the
Constitution. Whereas Lincoln spoke of "the only greater institu-
tion," the politician is here said to have an "equal" motive with
the pious man, as if "human happiness" and immortal felicity
were on the same levell Washington bids us indulge with caution
the supposition that "morality" can be maintained without re-
ligion. But in the very next sentence he says, with contrasting
emphasis, that reason and experience forbid us to expect "national
morality" thus to prevail. And he conspicuously sets aside the
question of a religious requirement for superior minds with a
superior education. We here see the mingling, like oil and water,
of the rationalism and religion of the eighteenth century. Compare
Washington's "equalizing" of piety and policy with the following
statement of Lincoln from a handbill to the voters of the Seventh
Congressional District in Illinois in 1846, when he was running for
the House and his opponent, the evangelical minister Peter
Cartwright had circulated a charge of infidelity against him:

I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man
for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer
at, religion. Leaving the higher [our italics] matter of eter-
nal consequences, between him and his Maker, I still do not
think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings,
and injure the morals, of the community in which he may
live. 5

Washington propounds the need for reverence and concedes
(more then he insists) that reverence (or obligation) is born
of the sense of the sacred that religion bestows. But there is
no trace of reverence in Washington's discussion of the need for
reverence; the sacred is treated as a necessity of the profane.
In Lincoln the profane is transformed into the sacred, but in
Washington the profane order merely profits from the existence
in it of men who fear God.

It is worth our while also to consider some parallel reflections
from Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, produced in the years 1781
and 1782, and a commentary of unsurpassed authority on the
spirit of '76. The following is from Query XVII, concerning the
different religions of Virginia. Jefferson has just enumerated some
surviving relics of the old common-law penalties for heresy.

This is a summary view of that religious slavery under which

24O POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

a people have been willing to remain, who have lavished
their lives and fortunes for the establishment of their civil
freedom. The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the
operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are
subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have
no authority over such natural rights, only as we have sub-
mitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted,
we could not submit We are answerable for them to our
God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such
acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury
for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God.
It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. e

The view of the nature and value of religious and civil liberty
here expressed by Jefferson was unquestionably Lincoln's own.
Or, we should say, it was as much Lincoln's view as it was Jef-
ferson's; for we can discover expressions by both men which imply
similar qualifications to the foregoing doctrine. Jefferson could
hardly have meant with full seriousness that the object of govern-
ment was solely to prevent damage to the body or the pocket.
On the other hand, when Lincoln says no man has a right to
insult the feelings or injure the morals of his fellow citizens, he
does not mean that the citizen has a political right to legal pro-
tection against such injury. He means that the offender suffers
just punishment when he loses the esteem and good will of his
fellow citizens. Jefferson accepts this, too, when he says, "If it
be said, his [i.e,, the scoffer's] testimony in a court of justice
cannot be relied on, reject it then, and be the stigma on him. 1 *
Both men accept the idea of social stigma as the natural and
appropriate reward for contemptuous heterodoxy. Lincoln, how-
ever, would never have expressed as openly, or rather as irascibly,
as Jefferson does his contempt for the older religious tradition,
which sees eternal salvation as something to which the powers
of government might contribute positively. Why he would not
has never been better expressed than by Jefferson himself in the
very next query in the famous Notes. The following embraces
a passage which was, to Lincoln, a jewel whose price was sur-
passed only by the Declaration of Independence itself:

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when
we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the
minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 24!

That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I
tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that
his justice cannot sleep forever . . J

How did Jefferson suppose that one man could not injure another
by spreading atheism and skepticism if the only firm basis of our
liberties was a conviction of particular providence, of dependence
upon a personal God for the receiving of our rights, and of his
rewards and punishments for honoring or dishonoring them? The
answer is, presumably, that "Reason and free inquiry are the
only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they
will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their
tribunal, to the test of their investigation." 8 There is a suggestion
of naive optimism, however, in this celebrated aphorism. How
do we know that the tribunal of reason and free inquiry will have
the power of subpoena? That Jefferson was not naive, however,
the following passage from the same paragraph (from Query
XVII) assuredly indicates. Its summons to shore up the people's
respect for the principles of the people's government indicates
an impressive agreement concerning the fundamental problem
of American government by Washington, Hamilton, Madison,
Jefferson, and Lincoln.

Let us ... get rid, while we may, of those tyrannical laws
[of heresy, perpetuated by the old common law]. It is true,
we are yet secured against them by the spirit of the times
. . . But is the spirit of the people an infallible, a permanent
reliance? . . . the spirit of the times may alter, will alter.
Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless ... It
can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every
essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest,
and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we
shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort
every moment to the people for support . . . They will
forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money,
and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for
their rights. 9

Jefferson saw in the revolutionary fervor a rare opportunity for
fixing the principles of civil and religious liberty in public law.
The backsliding that Lincoln was to lament in 1838 and thereafter,
Jefferson amply anticipated. But Jefferson did not seem to antici-

342 POIJTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

pate what a broken reed the law itself would be once the spirit of
the people departed from it. And there was a fundamental incon-
sistency in Jefferson's faith in "reason and free inquiry" and his
belief that the people would normally be preoccupied, not with
their rights, but with the avid pursuit of gain. For the people to re-
main united in effecting due respect from their "rulers" for their
rights, they must themselves first have such respect. And this re-
spect, according to Jefferson no less than Lincoln, depends upon a
firm conviction that they are the gift of a just God. No responsible
statesman can then be indifferent to anything that weakens such a
conviction. He must, on the contrary, hold that the strengthening
of that conviction is the first and highest task of statesmanship, be-
cause it is the condition of every other political good. This task,
however, Lincoln, no less than Jefferson, held to be outside the
framework of politics in the ordinary sense. It is not for the law
to command assent to religious doctrines; on the contrary, it is
the function of religious doctrines to command assent to the rule
of law. Reason and free inquiry will support the true religion,
in Jefferson's sense, if the people support the rule of law erected
on the foundation of their own rights. But reason and free inquiry
cannot pursue their vocation in an atmosphere of mob violence;
reason and free inquiry presuppose, for their efficacy, Lincoln's
"political religion," Jefferson's "firm basis" in the conviction of
divine justice.

It is of some importance that the central thought not only of
the Gettysburg Address but of Lincoln's second inaugural has its
literary foundationapart from the Old and New Testaments
in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, whom Lincoln called "the
most distinguished politician of our history." The passage in the
eighteenth query of the Notes, from which we have quoted in
part, 10 contains a prophecy by Jefferson of a tremendous "revolu-
tion of the wheel of fortune," in which he foresaw the possibility
that the position of the white and black races on this continent
might one day be reversed. Nay, more, such "an exchange of
situation . . . may become probable by supernatural interference.
The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such
a contest," he says, in anticipation of, "It may seem strange that
any men should dare ask a just God's assistance in wringing their
bread from the sweat of other men's faces." But Jefferson ended
this discussion in the Notes by flying completely in the face of his

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 243

previous prediction that "From the conclusion of this war we shall
be going downhill" and optimistically envisaged "the spirit of the
master abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition
mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of
heaven, for a total emancipation . . . with the consent of the
masters, rather than by their extirpation/'

Yet Jefferson was far more correct when he saw that the people's
preoccupation with money-making would undermine their re-
spect for human rights, particularly when money could be made
by trafficking in bodies and souls possessed of those rights. It
is impressive and significant beyond words that Jefferson, who
was such a confirmed detractor of revealed theology, and whose
works are filled with contempt for it, of the quality of the pocket-
picking, leg-breaking order, could not but express himself in the
most solemn language of that theology when he contemplated
the institution of Negro slavery. On Jefferson's own premises it
would seem that nothing would have been efficacious in abating
the avarice in the master's spirit but a conviction that a living God
would one day cause all the wealth piled up by the bondman's
unrequited toil to be sunk and a conviction that the master's own
life and liberty might perish in the convulsion. Jefferson's warfare
against clerical influences was a noble warfare in so far as it
meant establishing religious liberty. But Jefferson carried that
warfare too far, if we are to take seriously what he himself says
about the basis of civil and religious liberty. And Jefferson's
notoriety as a free thinker made it difficult, if not impossible, for
him to be taken seriously when he did warn his countrymen of
divine vengeance for their sinful adherence to slavery.

It must not be thought, however, that because Lincoln wished
to enlist the religious feelings of the American people in full sup-
port of their form of government that he saw no dangers to civil
liberty from religious passions. The truth is the exact opposite.
The struggle for separation of church and state, for disestablish-
ment, for most of the legal forms of religious freedom, had been
largely won; Jefferson's victory had been virtually complete. But
theological intolerance in American political life now took a sub-
tler and more dangerous form. Mid-nineteenth-century America
was swept by a whole series of alleged reform movements tem-
perance, abolitionism (and its southern counterpart, the positive-
good advocacy of slavery), nativism, Young Americanism, femi-
nism (in its early manifestations) and many of these received

244 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

their dynamic impulse by the encouragement they received from,
and their association with, the churches. A single word sums up
the common core of many of these mid-century movements, and
that is mittennialism. The vision animating reformers was not that
of a better world but of a well-nigh perfect world, of a New
Jerusalem. Theirs was secularized Puritanism, combining the
spirit of religious messianism with the substance of a naive
rationalism and this-worldly utopianism. In the peroration of Lin-
coln's Temperance Address, to which we shall shortly turn, he
characterizes the aim of this movement as the final subjection of
all passions to reason, of all matter to mind. It is not the ameliora-
tion of the human condition but the transformation of human
nature which is here meant by "reform."

The temperance movement and the abolitionist movement
were both nurtured by the evangelical spirit, and what Lincoln
has to say about temperance will give us a remarkable insight
into his whole view of reform, as that was understood in both
these movements. "Temperance" is, in a sense, the more funda-
mental of the two, since it meant not the Aristotelian golden
mean of the passions but the entire elimination of the influence
of passion over human conduct, chattel slavery being only one
consequence of such influence. That the root of slavery was in-
deed in bad human passions Lincoln certainly believed. Jefferson
had said that, particularly in a warm climate, no man will earn
his own bread if he can compel another to earn it for him, and
Lincoln had repeated this thought in many variants. 11 But Lin-
coln was sensitive to the danger that extreme expectations of
worldly perfection would engender extreme political solutions,
requiring extreme measures and extreme power in those who
would carry them through. The expectations that were proper
and fitting for the kingdom of heaven might be fatal to the free-
dom of a republic. The spirit of theological intolerance, denied
by Jefferson the instrument of power for theological ends, might
be vindictively triumphant if it seized the goals of secular ration-
alism as its own.

We saw in Lincoln's Lyceum speech not only a far-sighted
anticipation of dangers threatening the perpetuation of our politi-
cal institutions but a serious critique of the principles upon which
they were originally based. This critique had the purpose not of
weakening the faith of its would-be preserver but of making it
more enlightened. We saw how and why a critical detachment

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 245

from the object of their highest devotion was a necessary attri-
bute of founders and of saviors. But Lincoln saw himself not only
as the savior of the political institutions, but by that fact the
founder of a political religion. And that implied and required
another, similar kind of critical detachment. Lincoln's temperance
speech contains a theological critique which parallels his critique
of the dogmas of the Revolution.

Like the Lyceum speech, the Temperance Address had its
occasion in contemporary political developments. When Lincoln
delivered it, it would have been difficult to say whether temper-
ance or slavery would be the dominating vote-producing question
of the years just ahead. The famous Maine liquor law was passed
in that state shortly after the Compromise of 1850, and laws
modeled on it were passed in Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode
Island, and Connecticut The prohibition ferment reached a peak
in Illinois in 1855, an ^ a version of the Maine law passed there
two weeks after Lincoln had failed in his first bid for the Senate.
By that time, however, he had hitched his wagon to the anti-
slavery star and found it prudent to keep silent on the liquor
question. In 1842, however, he was espousing the temperance
cause energetically. That Lincoln did not believe in temperance,
as the reformers believed in it, we believe it is easy to demon-
strate. In the address we shall see Lincoln disavow the spirit of
intolerance which characterized the "old school champions" of
temperance, as he was later to disavow John Brown and abolition.
Yet even as he one day became the Great Emancipator, after a
lifelong disapproval of abolition, so we find him here, in a kind
of anticipatory gesture, accomplishing a similar feat by placing
himself, rhetorically, at the head of a movement in which he
found more to disapprove than to approve.

Although Lincoln had little sympathy with abolitionist or tem-
perance reformers, it was because he disapproved of their temper
and their methods. His sympathy with the ultimate aims of
abolition cannot be doubted, nor his sympathy with temperance,
if the term is understood rightly and not as the alleged reformers
understood it. For the nativists, the anti-immigrants, the Know-
Nothings, self-styled "Americans," Lincoln felt only loathing and
contempt How could he, he once said, who abhorred the op-

246 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

pression of Negroes, approve the degrading of classes of white
men? Yet it was Lincoln's political fate one day to need the
Know-Nothing vote in much the same way that Douglas needed
the pro-slavery vote. And the temperance movement, as we have
noted, being an offshoot of radical Protestantism, had anti-
Catholic, anti-foreign overtones. Particularly were there anti-Irish
overtones, for the Irish were hated both for their Popery and
their alleged addiction to drink. In the Temperance Address there
is, incidentally, a good-natured Irish joke. The joke is harmless
enough, yet plays on both the risibilities and prejudices of the
audience, neatly drawing attention from what might otherwise
have been a dangerous doctrine: the absurdity of other-worldly
in contrast to this-worldly sanctions for morality. The Whig
Lincoln might thus tell Irish jokes; it is doubtful that the Democrat
Douglas would have done so. In short, Lincoln's Temperance
Address, on the surface a merely conventional oration, strongly
praising virtue and condemning vice, is a well-appointed ship
for navigating some of the strongest voting tides of mid-century
America: temperance, abolition, nativism.

Yet the theme of the speech is one of the four cardinal virtues,
not a concrete political proposal. How did Lincoln on this one
occasion discuss moral virtue? Consider the nature of the occasion
on which he spoke. The following is from the first volume of
Beveridge's Lincoln: 12

The Temperance movement . . . which had been in prog-
ress all over the country, was now in full swing throughout
Illinois; and ... an extraordinary temperance agitation
was in progress. The feeling against excessive drinking, which
had shown itself by petitions to the legislature had come
to a head, and fervent temperance meetings were being
held in every township. Lincoln joined this crusade and
made temperance speeches in many villages and hamlets.
The Washingtonian Society, largely made up of reformed
drunkards, had swept over the nation . . . When a unit of
this society was formed in Springfield, he delivered a tem-
perance address before it on Washington's birthday 1842.

It was a great occasion. From eleven o'clock until noon a
procession paraded the streets. At the head marched "the
beautiful company of Sangamo guards under the command
of Captain E. D. Baker." 13 An "immense crowd" gathered

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 5247

at the Second Presbyterian Church where the exercises were
held. Brightly shone the sun on that joyous day and loud
rang the songs of temperance. So "delighted" was the audi-
ence with the singing, that "several pieces were a second
tune called for and repeated." Finally, soon after twelve
o'clock Lincoln rose and addressed the audience that packed
the church-
In this atmosphere, a quaint indigenous mixture of revival meet-
ing, political jamboree, and football rally, Lincoln discoursed on
a theme that had taxed the wisest heads of Athens and Jerusalem
and of the great universities. One can hardly imagine an occasion
better calculated to bring forth all the clich& of a man's soul,
yet Lincoln's performance on this occasion was not unworthy of
a pupil of the greatest of the masters who had preceded him.
Lincoln did in a way produce all the cliches that the occasion
called for. But they were not the cliches of his soul. Clich&, in one
sense or another, are indispensable to public speaking. The prob-
lem, we believe, is whether a speaker, in identifying himself with
his audience, thereby surrenders any independent identity of his
own or achieves, at least in speech ( the indispensable basis for
achieving it in deed), a new identity for the audience. This
rhetorical question is discussed explicitly within the Temperance
Address:

When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced,
persuasion, land, unassuming persuasion, should ever be
adopted. It is an old and true maxim "that a drop of honey
catches more flies than a gallon of gall." So with men. If
you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that
you are his sincere friend Therein is a drop of honey that
catches his heart, which, say what you will, is the great high
road to his reason . . .

We may assume then that Lincoln will give us an example
of that maxim applied. While the formal or apparent subject of
the speech is the praise of a movement devoted to banishing
intoxicating liquor, its real subject is the difference between the
wrong and the right way of effecting any moral reform in society.
More specifically, it is the difference between a temperate and
an intemperate approach to moral reform. Since Lincoln in the
speech presents himself as a moral reformer, Lincoln's speech,

248 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

which is also Lincoln's deed upon the occasion, should be an
example of temperate action. But "actions speak louder than
words," and men's actions sometimes bely their words. "Don't
do as I do; do as I say," may sometimes be good advice, but
no one ever takes it. Every moralist knows that precept without
example is vain, and the political moralist knows that the pattern
of behavior he sets before his audience will influence them more
deeply than the arguments he employs while setting that pat-
tern. Now no man has ever been more credited with self-control
than Lincoln; and if it is true, as Aristotle says, that we must
look to the men we credit with the virtues to understand what
virtue is, then we must not only listen to what Lincoln says but
observe how he himself exercised self-control on this occasion.
To comprehend his behavior, we must attend not only to the
explicit argument of the speech but to the argument implicit in
the consequences which we discern are intended by the speech.
How the implicit and explicit arguments may differ may be in-
dicated by some brief anticipations of the analysis to follow.
When Lincoln criticizes the means employed by others to effect
moral reform we must ask precisely how the means he is at that
moment employing differ from those he rejects. And if we some-
times find, as we shall, that Lincoln pays his antagonists the
sincerest kind of flattery, that of imitation, we may suspect that
the explicit argument is, in part at least, specious and that the
real controversy is not limited to means but concerns ends. Re-
flecting further, we may conclude that the reason for the partial
substitution of a specious issue for a real one is that Lincoln
differs not only with his alleged antagonists but with his alleged
friends. In this way we may also find that real temperance is far
more a virtue of the appetites of the mind than of those of the
body, that it has more to do with the control of one's thoughts, or
the expression of those thoughts, than with the control of one's
thirst.

In the passage we have quoted Lincoln says that you must
convince a man that you are his sincere friend if you would
win him to your cause. The impression throughout the speech is
that the temperance cause is Lincoln's cause. Yet, whether this
were true or not, Lincoln would be required by his own rhetorical
principle to give such an impression; otherwise, how could he
convince the temperance people (including, of course, those who
would vote temperance "as long as they could stagger to the

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 249

polls") that he was their friend? As a politician Lincoln always
was compelled to adopt, to "befriend," professed causes and be-
liefs of his fellow citizens and hoped-for constituents. Yet to adopt
the opinions of others, for public purposes, does not mean to
believe in them. The Temperance Address shows, as do few
documents of modern politics, a method whereby a public man
can both accept and reject the prejudices of his contemporaries;
how he can, at one and the same time, flatter their vanity and
chasten their egotism; how he can, appearing to agree with their
opinions, modify them, however little, or failing that, so to pro-
mote his own leadership that, when these opinions come to be
applied, they will be applied by a man whose judgment is not
chained to them and who can thus utilize them for wiser purposes.

A broad survey of Lincoln's Temperance Address discloses a
plan with a chronological pattern. 14 It begins with a celebration
of the present success of the movement, reviews its past history,
and ends with an apocalyptic vision of its future complete tri-
umph. Now it is a principle of rhetoric, of public speaking, that
the beginning and the end are the parts which particularly arrest
attention, just as the contrasting dialectic principle focuses at-
tention on the center. The beginning and the end are the "ex-
ternals," the parts best calculated to strike the notice of the
unobservant many, who are the typical addressees of rhetoric.
It is in these parts of his speech that we would especially look
for the cliches or conventional opinions called for by the occasion.
And Lincoln does not disappoint us on the contrary, he exceeds
every legitimate expectation! Let us hear him celebrate the
present success of the cause with almost every excess of allitera-
tion, assonance, repetition, and metaphor:

The list of its friends is daily swelled by the additions of
fifties, of hundreds, and of thousands. The cause itself seems
suddenly transformed from a cold, abstract theory, to a
living, breathing, active, and powerful chieftain, going forth
"conquering and to conquer." The citadels of his great ad-
versary are daily being stormed and dismantled; his temples
and his altars, where the rites of his idolatrous worship have
long been performed, and where daily sacrifices have long
been wont to be made, are daily desecrated and deserted.
The trump of the conqueror's fame is sounding from hill to

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

hill, from sea to sea, and from land to land, and calling
millions to his standard at a blast

If the foregoing sample of buncombe seems overdone, listen to
the following, from the peroration, to which we adverted above,
in which the millennial vision of the final triumph of the temper-
ance cause is hailed in frenzied accents suggestive of passages
in the Book of Revelation:

... its march cannot fail to be on and on, till every son
of earth shall drink in rich fruition the sorrow quenching
draughts of perfect liberty. Happy day, when all appetites
controlled, all passions subdued, all matters subjected, mind,
all conquering mind, shall live and move the monarch of
the world. Glorious consummation! Hail, fall of furyl Reign
of Reason, all hail!

That contemplation of the final victory of temperance should
induce such verbal intoxication is an incongruity which, we think,
did not escape the author of the passage, especially in considera-
tion of the malicious play on the sense of the word "drink." 15 With
this we state plainly our opinion that Lincoln, in the beginning
and end of his Temperance Address, was caricaturing the style
of the enthusiasts of the movement. The caricature is close enough
to reality to please the enthusiasts, while exaggerated enough to
indicate to any shrewd non-enthusiast that Lincoln was not such
an enthusiast himself. In short, Lincoln's exaggerated style, in
the most rhetorical parts of his speech, is a rhetorical device to
show how purely rhetorical are the sentiments therein expressed!
However, it is not so much the stylistic metaphor in the extremities
of the speech as the argument at its center that contains Lincoln's
considered views. Before turning to that argument we observe
that, throughout the speech, Lincoln employs this same device
whenever he presents, even in indirect discourse, the rhetoric of
the devotees, old or new, of the movement. When he presents
his own commentary or criticism, it is in a style as simple and
free from affectation as the Gettysburg Address. Humorless
critics, who have failed to perceive the difference between the
sober accents that are Lincoln's own and the high style of his
mimicry, have called the speech an immature work. We can not
readily recall a more precocious example of literary skill.

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 251

The central section of the address is introduced by the following
sentence:

For this new and splendid success, we heartily rejoice. That
that success is so much greater now than heretofore, is doubt-
less owing to rational causes; and if we would have it to
continue, we shall do well to inquire what those causes are.

This plain prose follows immediately after the passage from the
exordium concerning the conqueror's blast. Lincoln turns from the
celebration of the success of the temperance movement to an
inquiry into the causes of that success. The alleged purpose of
such an inquiry is to enable the success to continue. On the
assumption that no one has previously supplied this knowledge,
Lincoln implies that true understanding has not hitherto guided
the movement; its present success is then due to providence or
chance. We must remember this in observing the praise of the
Washingtonians, wherein their wisdom is contrasted with the folly
of the old reformers. The wisdom of the Washingtonians is not
true wisdom; it is at most what Aristotle would call successful
experience, and without a correct knowledge of the cause of that
experience it will never be true wisdom. Only as Lincoln supplies
that knowledge of causes will it be a true reform movement

But Lincoln's turn to the quest for "rational causes" leads in
a somewhat unexpected way to deeper questions. The rational
causes are said to consist, for the most part, in the human
passions, which Lincoln here treats, almost like Spinoza, as if
they were governed by a necessity as much a part of the order
of nature as that whereby a stone falls. The old temperance
reformers were the fire-and-brimstone type who used denuncia-
tion instead of the persuasion we have already seen Lincoln
recommend. What was the result of their tactics?

To have expected them [i.e., the dram sellers and the dram
drinkers] to do otherwise than as they did to have expected
them not to meet denunciation with denunciation, crimina-
tion with crimination, and anathema with anathema, was to
expect a reversal of human nature, which is God's decree,
and can never be reversed.

The quest for "rational causes" is thus a quest for causes rooted
in human nature. That men should be governed in their behavior
by such causes is here attributed by Lincoln to God: natural law

POUnCAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

and divine law appear to coincide. However, Lincoln's manner
of reference to the divine decree is somewhat heterodox: he says
that it "can" never be reversed, not that it "will" never be reversed.
Traditionally the God of Israel was thought to be bound by his
own promises but not by necessity. It is rather the God of
Aristotle and Spinoza who is so bound. 16 Now we believe it was,
at least in Lincoln's day, ground common to all Christian sects
that the strength of some passions, at least, was not to be attrib-
uted to God's decree but to man's sinfulness. While different
sects estimated differently the extent of the weakening of man's
nature as a result of the Fall, all agreed that in man's fallen
condition a knowledge of human nature alone does not suffice.
Lincoln's attack on the intemperance of the old temperance
movement involved, necessarily, an attack on the premise upon
which that movement rested, namely, its theology. That theology
taught that the prime conditions of moral reformation were faith
and grace and that natural knowledge of natural causes would
be worthless without these; Lincoln, to say the least, reverses
this priority and seems to argue that rational knowledge of human
nature is sufficient and that the intrusion of the doctrine of man's
sinfulness into the work of moral reform has been an obstacle
to the beneficent operation of these natural causes. It is true that
Lincoln also implies in the course of the speech that the Washing-
tonians not only work in harmony with human nature but that
they are ipso facto the bearers of a true Christianity, as distinct
from the Pharisaical Christianity of the old-school champions. But
whether, according to Lincoln, the provenience of the "true"
Christianity is the Christian revelation or natural knowledge of
human nature is not easy to say. The relation of moral virtue
to revelation on the one hand and to unassisted reason on the
other is the deepest problem of Lincoln's Temperance Address.

The topical arrangement of the body of the speech is detailed
and complex. It has two clearly distinguishable parts, but the
relation of these is problematic. Of the thirty paragraphs of
Lincoln's text, we refer to numbers three to twenty-four as the
body. 17 Of these, numbers three to eighteen may be classified
under the heading "causes of present success" and numbers nine-
teen to twenty-four under the heading "causes of future success."
The ratio is thus roughly three to one (roughly, because the
paragraphs are not of equal length). However, the part dealing

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 253

with present success is, in fact, chiefly an account of the causes of
past failure. Although the new movement is praised by way of
contrast with the old, twice as much space is devoted to condemn-
ing the old as to praising the new. When we come to the much
shorter section called "causes of future success," we find that Lin-
coln devoted less than a third of it to what he says will be the
main cause of that success namely, the missionary work of the
reformed drunkards and more than two thirds to discussing the
objections of the non-drunkards whose assistance is supposed to
be vital but who want no part in a drunkards' movement, re-
formed or otherwise. If we add up the space Lincoln devotes to
objections to both temperance movements, old and new, we find
that more than two thirds of the body of the speech consists of
criticisms and attacks on temperance movements.

I have said that the relation of these two central parts is
problematic. It is not clear whether the second of the two is
thought to succeed the first or is conceived as a subdivision of
the first. This uncertainty, in a work so carefully articulated, may
not be inadvertent. The section accounting for present success
is, as we have noted, mainly preoccupied with past failure. This
failure Lincoln in large measure attributes, as we have said, to
Christian theology, or one interpretation of that theology. The
contrasting success of the Washingtonians is attributed in this
section not to a contrasting interpretation of Christianity but to
a wise (or, rather, fortunate) co-operation with the beneficial
passions of human nature. But then in the succeeding section ( if
it is in fact the succeeding one), purportedly devoted to the
grounds for future success, Lincoln concentrates upon the princi-
pal anticipated obstacle to that success. This obstacle is the con-
tempt that virtuous men feel for the vicious and their sense of
superiority even to those who have reformed. This attitude of
proud contempt toward moral weaklings is, incidentally, fully
consistent with the idea of a virtuous man as that idea is expressed
in the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle says that the virtuous man
does not possess the sense of shame, for he would be incapable
of anything shameful. And a man who regards himself as incapa-
ble of shameful deeds cannot possibly possess the sympathy
toward those who are capable of them, whether reformed or not,
that one may possess who is conscious of weakness within himself.
In this context Lincoln appeals to the Christian idea of the
original and common sinfulness of humanity, to the idea that

254 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

there are none who are not moral weaklings, apart from divine
grace, to overcome the argument of the contemptuous non-
joiners. Thus Lincoln in the first of these two sections accounted
for the failure of the old temperance movement largely because
of the manner in which theological considerations, specifically a
doctrinaire application of the theory of original sin, impeded the
beneficent operation of human nature; in the latter section he
seems to appeal to another aspect of the identical theological
dogma to aid in the final victory of the new temperance move-
ment. The fundamental difficulty, as it seems to us, in interpreting
Lincoln's Temperance Address is whether the theology to which
he appeals to remove the obstacles to final success is the same
or different from that which was the root of the past failure of
the movement. If this theology is ultimately one and the same,
then the alleged condition of the final victory of the movement
would be of a piece with the alleged cause of its past failure. There
would then be no final victory over intemperance, and the ac-
count of the future would in reality be a part of the account
of the past.

Let us now turn to the first of the two foregoing parts of the
body of the Temperance Address. This also is divided into two
main parts: the first devoted to the proposition that the old
movement was championed by the wrong men, the second, that
it employed the wrong measures.

The warfare heretofore waged against the demon of in-
temperance has, somehow or other, been erroneous. Either
the champions engaged, or the tactics they adopted, have
not been the most proper. These champions for the most
part, have been Preachers, Lawyers, and hired agents. Be-
tween these and the mass of mankind, there is a want of
approachdbility, if the term be admissible, partially at least,
fatal to success.

". . . it is so easy," Lincoln proceeds:

and so common to ascribe motives to men of these classes,
other than those they profess to act upon. The preacher, it
is said, advocates temperance because he is a fanatic, and
desires a union of Church and State; the lawyer, from his
pride and vanity of hearing himself speak; and the hired
agent, for his salary.

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 255

Now, of these three, the central class mentioned is that of lawyers,
and Lincoln, we all know, was a lawyer. Lincoln warns his audi-
ence against the class to which he himself belonged. Or should
we say that he warns them, and us, against the class that he
would belong to if he had been a temperance reformer? This
passage should be remembered when, in the sequel, we come
to Lincoln's alleged refutations of the objections of non-drunkards
to joining the Washingtonians. For who is there, apart from the
reformed drunks, whose motives the dram drinkers and dram
sellers might not equally suspect? Do not the butcher and baker
each have something to sell, and cannot they too be suspected
of joining a public hue and cry for interested reasons? If the
motives of all such men are suspect, then it would injure the
movement rather than benefit it, on the grounds Lincoln shows,
if they were to join it. And if Lincoln does urge such men to
join the movement, as he later does, does he not show himself
a questionable friend? Does he not thereby raise in our minds
a doubt as to his motives, of the kind he assigns here to lawyers
as a class?

However, in listing preachers, lawyers, and hired agents as the
wrong kind of champions for a temperance movement, Lincoln
omits to mention politicians. And it was in his capacity of politi-
cian, rather than that of lawyer, that Lincoln appeared on the
platform. If infatuation with the sound of their own voices is a
vice of lawyers, it is even more the vice of professional vote
getters. Certainly the power of vanity over the demagogue, who
thinks his voice is the voice of the people and the people's that
of God, is infinitely greater. It is difficult to avoid the impression
that when Lincoln says "lawyers" he means "politicians." The very
reason for Lincoln's swimming in the temperance tide was that
it was becoming not merely a movement for moral reform but
a movement for legislation, a plank in party platforms. In our
opinion Lincoln's concentration upon the peculiar virtues of the
Washingtonians points away from such legislation and leads much
more logically to such an organization as Alcoholics Anonymous,
with emphasis on both A's.

But when one, who has long been known as a victim of
intemperance, bursts the fetters that have bound him, and
appears before his neighbors "clothed, and in his right mind,"
a redeemed specimen of lost humanity, and stands up with

256 POUTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

tears of joy trembling in eyes, to tell of the miseries once
endured, now to be endured no more forever . . . however
simple his language, there is a logic, and an eloquence in it,
that few, with human feelings, can resist. They cannot say
that he desires a union of church and state, for he is not
a church member; they can not say that he is vain of hearing
himself speak, for his whole demeanor shows, he would
gladly avoid speaking at all ... Nor can his sincerity in
any way be doubted; or his sympathy for those he would
persuade to imitate his example, be denied.

Lincoln, the lawyer-politician, could not help joining a movement
which, on its face, was concerned with the relief of real human
misery. Yet he saw in the currents of passion that swirled about
such a movement many that would exploit that misery rather
than relieve it. It was impossible to avoid participation in the
movement without abandoning the lambs to the wolves. If Lincoln
was compelled by his own rhetoric to class himself among the
wolves, yet he nonetheless effectively warns those who will listen
of the danger of wolves. In so doing he plays the role not of
the wolf but of the shepherd.

We come now to the argument that the old-school champions
employed the wrong measures. Such measures are said to be
wrong for two reasons. The first of these flows directly from the
character of the "wrong men." "Unapproachable" men employ the
tactics of "unapproachability." Yet the concept of unapproach-
ability is subtly narrowed. It was said before that it was possible
to ascribe narrow and selfish motives to preachers, lawyers, and
hired agents. But now Lincoln singles out the tactics of denun-
ciation, the tactics of fanaticism, the special province of the
preachers. Why such tactics are imprudent we have already seen.
But he says here they are wrong for another reason: because
they are unjust. Now Lincoln's announced intention of inquiring
into the "rational causes" of the present success of the temperance
movement would, we think, have been sufficiently realized if he
had limited himself to the instrumental question of how to enlist
the passions of drinkers in the cause of reform. To say that the
old temperance movement was unjust is to say not only that it
employed the wrong means but that it was devoted to the wrong

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 257

end. For justice is not merely the means but the end of civil
society.

Lincoln's attack on the injustice of the old temperance move-
ment is elaborated with great care. It is divided into two main
subsections: the first of these maintains that drinking was sanc-
tioned by universal public opinion, that such opinion is, in effect,
the social basis of conscience, and that nothing sanctioned by it
can justly be condemned; the second subsection, which we shall
discuss first, is a renewed attack on the tactics of denunciation,
an attack no longer limited to its ineffectiveness but emphasizing
its inhumanity and moral baseness. Here is the first part of this
second subsection:

Another error . . . into which the old reformers fell, was,
the position that all habitual drunkards were utterly incor-
rigible, and therefore must be turned adrift, and damned
without remedy, in order that the grace of temperance might
abound to the temperate then, and to all mankind some
hundred years thereafter. There is in this something so re-
pugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so coldblooded and
feelingless, that it never did, nor ever can enlist the enthusi-
asm of a popular cause. We could not love the man who
taught it we could not hear him with patience. The heart
could not throw open its portals to it. The generous man
could not adopt it. It could not mix with his blood. It looked
so fiendishly selfish, so like throwing fathers and brothers
overboard, to lighten the boat for our security that the
noble-minded shrank from the manifest meanness of the
thing.

Comparisons are proverbially invidious. But since we know that
Pilgrim's Progress was one of the books that the young Lincoln
read assiduously, we cannot help asking how the purportedly
secular doctrine here attacked differs from the spiritual doctrine
incorporated in Bunyan's tale of Christian, leaving behind his
own blood and kind that he might alone attain the Heavenly City?
Turning from such a speculative question, we observe that,
whereas Lincoln had employed merciless ridicule to point out
the ineffectiveness of the tactics of denunciation, 18 when he con-
templates their moral baseness he himself echoes the language
of the old-school champions. Lincoln had begun, you will recall,
by lamenting the absence of "persuasion, kind, unassuming

258 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

persuasion," from the old temperance movement But he "for-
gets" the sympathetic approach which he recommends toward
the drunks when he turns to those who saw in drunkenness an
absence of "grace," which is to say the tokens of unredeemed
original sin. Lincoln had said, "If you would win a man to your
cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend." But he
speaks of the old reformers as "fiendishly selfish" and says that
the "noble-minded" shrink from their "manifest meanness."
Clearly, no friendly intercourse is possible between men who
regard each other as Lincoln regarded these men. In other words,
by his example, though not by his precept, Lincoln agrees with
the old reformers that some form of ostracism or excommunication
is the just, if not the necessary, response to what appears to us
as morally abominable. But, while Lincoln does not regard the
drunks as abominable, his language characterizing the old re-
formers certainly implies that they are.

This in turn throws a different light upon the tactics of reform.
These tactics consist for the most part of "persuasion," as we have
seen. Persuasion means turning potential friends into actual
friends. In identifying yourself with the man you would persuade,
you lead him to identify himself with your cause. But the very
condition that leads to friendship, love of what is common to
the friends, involves hate: hate of what is alien to them. For
we cannot love something without hating what would destroy
it. If I love someone, I will hate his enemies. Love can be seen
in part by affirmation but in part also by negation. It was necessary
even for Jesus to demonstrate his identification with humanity,
his love of humanity, not only by consorting with sinners and
Samaritans but by attacking the money-changers in the temple.

With this our argument appears, not for the first time, to have
oome full circle. As Lincoln began by ridiculing the tactics of
denunciation, only to employ them, so now we find him attacking
the doctrine of incorrigibiHty, of irremediable damnation, yet
adopting some such doctrine as the tacit premise of the attack.
For it is the argument of the whole Temperance Address that
it is our duty, so far as in us lies, to make actual friends of
potential friends, never to make potential friends into actual
enemies. Yet Lincoln, according to the natural law of the passions
he invoked above ("which is God's decree, and can never be
reversed"), must here be making enemies of the old reformers. 19
Yet so to do could not be justified, on his principles, unless some

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 259

men were only potential enemies and not potential friends. And
this could not be true unless in some sense the doctrine of in-
corrigibility were true.

We must then inquire whether Lincoln's argument is simply
self-contradictory or whether there is a valid difference between
the sense in which Lincoln must have accepted the doctrine of
incorrigibility and the sense in which he rejected it. To see what
this difference might be, let us review some passages in which
comparisons are drawn between the two classes of "incorrigibles."
The first of these is made by implication in the second paragraph
of the address, where Lincoln said that the "cause itself seems
suddenly transformed from a cold abstract theory, to a living,
breathing, active, and powerful chieftain." What is there implicit
becomes explicit when Lincoln says:

They [the Washingtonians] know they [the drunkards] are
not demons, not even the worst of men. They know that
generally, they are kind, generous, and charitable, even be-
yond the example of their more staid and sober neighbors.
They are practical philanthropists; and they glow with a
generous and brotherly zeal, that mere theorists are incapable
of feeling,

We may descry a current of argument here suggestive of Edmund
Burke's attack on the French Revolutionists. Lincoln, like Burke,
opposes "theory" in the name of "practice." But the differences
are profounder than the similarities. Burke's attack on "theory"
was so wide-ranging and vituperative as to suggest that every
attempt, not only that of the disciples of Rousseau, to find a
metaphysical foundation for the principles of morals and politics
was either base or foolish. But it would indeed be strange to find
any real kinship between such anti-theoretical dogmatism and
the convictions of the man who was to build his political career
on "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and at all times." 20
Lincoln, far from attacking rationalism, is in fact basing his whole
case upon it. For, as we saw, Lincoln attributed the failure of
the methods of the old school to its ignorance of human nature.
Moreover, as we also saw, the hypothesis upon which the body
of the address is based is that the present success of the movement
must be attributable to "rational causes" and that the central func-
tion of the address is to supply such knowledge of causality. Now
knowledge of causality is knowledge of nature, human or non-

260 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

human; it is theoretical knowledge par excellence. However
practical his object, Lincoln also presents himself in the address
as a theoretician. The old-school champions are then "mere
theorists" because they are bad theorists. It is significant and,
we think, characteristic that in the passage in which Lincoln de-
nounces the baseness of the old reformers he speaks of this
baseness as flowing from a "position" which is an "error." Earlier
he had spoken of drunkards as men whose "failing was [tradition-
ally] treated as a misfortune, and not as a crime, or even a
disgrace." True vice is then linked with error, even as drunkenness
is treated by Lincoln, rather as Aristotle treats incontinence, which
is not properly called vice. Lincoln's association of vice, as
distinct from incontinence, with error naturally suggests the con-
verse: the association of virtue with knowledge. The Socratic
thesis lurking within the Temperance Address may provide the
key to much that is enigmatic in it.

The old reformers' conception of incorrigibility was founded
upon an interpretation and application of the doctrine of original
sin. And Lincoln seems to be saying something similar to what
Rousseau said in the Social Contract: Whoever says, "Outside the
Church there is no salvation," is a bad citizen and must be cut
off from the body politic. Lincoln's practical aim, throughout the
address, is friendship and harmony in civil society. True temper-
ance is productive of harmony or concord in the soul of society,
as in that of the individual. Bad passions constantly threaten this
harmony, yet the attempt to extirpate bad passions, as the old
reformers did, is self-defeating or worse. For the passion to extir-
pate, as distinct from the passion to control bad passion, is the
worst of all possible passions and produces discord and enmity
more than any other. Love, we said before, involves hate in that
we cannot love something without hating whatever would destroy
it. But the principle thus stated carries an implied qualification:
only the love of destructible things involves us in hatred. The
ungenerated, the imperishable, the eternal, can be loved without
ever requiring us to hate. We noted above that, according to
Aristotle, the man of perfect virtue has contempt for moral
weaklings. But the contempt of the great-souled man of antiquity
for his moral inferiors is a sign of a greater passion. The passion
for wisdom or the reflection in the great-souled man of the passion
for wisdom is the cause of his superiority, as it is the cause of
his contempt for his inferiors. For it is the philosopher's passionate

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 261

preoccupation with the eternal, with the divine, as distinct from
the ephemeral and the merely human, which makes it possible
for him to love without hating. How far Lincoln carried the impli-
cations of his own position in his own mind we need not here
decide; but it is clear that the dogmas of the theological reformers
made it impossible for them, even in the name of a God who was
ayaTrrj, to love without hating. That the theological reformers were
not genuinely preoccupied with the divine is shown by their
morbid attitude toward those who, as they thought, did not
stand in the same relation to the divine as they thought they
stood. They did not derive pleasure so much from the sense of
their own salvation as from that of the damnation of others. The
old reformers were the prototype of true intemperance. They did
not indulge the pleasures of the body; on the contrary, they denied
themselves these. But they subordinated the pleasures of the
body not to the true but to the spurious pleasures of the soul.
The analysis of Lincoln's argument suggests a portrait, as subtle
as it is profound, of the most dangerous of all political types: the
ascetic reformer whose underlying motivation is perverted sen-
suality. It is the Angelo of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure,
and the asceticism of such men, from Cromwell to Lenin and
Hitler, insists upon creating a New Jerusalem upon earth, if
necessary by removing from the world all who cannot live by their
criterion of saintliness. And this morbid irreconcilability to the
earthy quality of an earthly existence is inseparably connected, in
Lincoln's analysis, to the spurious character of their conception of
the divine and eternal. It is an illicit passion, masked by an in-
tellectual error as a passion for justice. The pleasure that such
men derive from the odor of their own sanctity, while it may
make them proof against ordinary vices, also makes them capable
of extraordinary crimes. For their supposed self-mastery is an ab-
surdly intensified egotism, a cosmic vanity. At the same time that
it denies them the common objects of passion it denies them
common sympathies. But while it excludes sympathy, it does not
exclude hatred. Whereas the great-souled man of antiquity was
conscious of his superiority, and his superiority begot contempt,
his contempt of moral weaklings was like that of an adult toward
children and was entirely consistent with personal kindness and
indulgence, even while exercising firmness in checking their
faults.
The argument just sketched suggests that not sympathy but con-

202 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

tempt is the true attitude toward moral weakness. In contradiction
to this is the manifest argument employed by Lincoln in favor of
joining the Washingtonians, a reformed drunkards' society, and
against the position of the contemptuous non-joiners.

"But," say some, "we are no drunkards; and we shall not
acknowledge ourselves such by joining a reformed drunkards'
society, whatever our influence might be." Surely no Christian
will adhere to this objection. If they believe, as they profess,
that Omnipotence condescended to take on himself the form
of sinful man, and as such, to die an ignominious death for
their sakes, surely they will not refuse submission to the
infinitely lesser condescension, for the temporal, and perhaps
eternal salvation, of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of
their own fellow creatures. Nor is the condescension very
great

It would probably be unfair to lay too great stress on the fact
that Lincoln says "they" and "their" five times in one sentence
when referring to Christians. Perhaps Lincoln meant no more by
this than he meant in 1846 when, a candidate for Congress, he
was charged by his opponent, a minister, with being an "open
scoffer at Christianity." This charge Lincoln indignantly denied,
although acknowledging that he was "not a member of any
Christian Church." However, whether or not Lincoln included
himself among those to whom the foregoing argument might be
addressed, he supplements it with another and different argu-
ment, which is introduced by the last sentence above.

In my judgement, such of us as have never fallen victims,
have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than
from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.
Indeed, I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class,
their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous com-
parison with those of any other class. There seems ever to
have been a proneness in the brilliant and the warm-blooded,
to fall into this vice the demon of intemperance ever seems
to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and
generosity.

We here see Lincoln employing two lines of argument, which we
might characterize as arguments from revelation and reason
respectively. By the first Lincoln addresses Christians through an

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 263

appeal to the Incarnation, showing that if they join the Washing-
tomans they can regard themselves as imitating not the inebriate
but Christ. The ambiguity of this argument makes it, however,
of doubtful value. 21 In the first place, it depends upon the doc-
trine of man's sinfulness for the Incarnation was necessitated by
the Falla doctrine which, as we have seen, Lincoln treats else-
where as an obstacle to that knowledge of human nature which
would be sufficient of itself to effect the work of moral reform.
But we may also be permitted to doubt its edifying character
even within the context of the theology it invokes. Would those
who joined for the motive here suggested imitate Jesus in any
spiritual sense? It is to be presumed that Jesus identified himself
with sinful humanity from compassion, from love. But would Lin-
coln's addressees do as much? In taking Jesus as their model,
would they not in fact overcome their repugnance to what was
below them by identifying themselves with what was above?
Would not pride, rather than compassion, be their motive? And
would not the act of condescension intensify, rather than attenu-
ate, their sense of superiority? It seems to us that the condescen-
sion of "Christians" who thus joined the Washingtonians, not out
of spontaneous good will, but from a deliberate decision to mortify
their feelings, would have been "positively insufferable." 22 In-
deed, such condescension would seem to be the breeding ground
of precisely that spiritual arrogance which Lincoln so much de-
plored in the old reformers. The attempt to overcome that natural
contempt which flowed from the natural sense of superiority of
the morally strong for the morally weak would then lead only
to an unnatural contempt. In short, the appeal here to revelation,
apart from the fact that it hardly fits into the category of "rational
causality" into which the body of the speech is designed to fall,
would overcome the attitude of the contemptuous non-joiners by
making of them even more contemptuous joiners. It could hardly
contribute to the success of the temperance movement. 23

Turning to the argument from "reason," we find that it, too, is
of doubtful value and full of ambiguity. In the first place, does
it strengthen the argument from Christianity to say that, after all,
no condescension is involved? If there is no condescension, why
mention the Incarnation? If the Incarnation is mentioned, why
doubt the necessity of condescension? Whatever independent

264 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

merits these two arguments have are not enhanced by their
proximity.

There is, of course, a large and important truth in Lincoln's
assertion that there is a proneness to intemperance in the blood
of "genius and generosity," but the inferences which he appears to
draw do not seem to be correct. As to the fact, the passions of
some men do seem to run far stronger than others. Moreover,
"nothing great is achieved without passion," and the measure of
a man's greatness is the greatness of the passion which his virtue
directs toward its proper objects. Yet the powerful appetites
which "great natures" have are in themselves morally neutral.
Those who succeed in mastering their appetites, subordinating
them to the work of virtue, are rightly honored and praised. But,
by the same token, those who fail are doubly blamed: blamed
for the evil they do, and blamed for the good which they fail
to do and of which they more than others were capable. 24 To
exempt men of superior talents from blame because their tempta-
tion to self-indulgence is greater would be to destroy the ground
for the praise of those who overcome temptation. One exception,
or rather qualification, to the foregoing criticism may be made.
There are situations or circumstances which test a man's virtue
beyond anything that virtue itself could anticipate or withstand.
From this it is that tragedy results. The catastrophe of a Macbeth,
a Lear, or an Othello is beyond mere moral condemnation. Be-
cause not even a man of the highest virtue can feel assurance
that he would be proof against the slips that led to their falls;
he can feel pity, terror, and horror at their fate but not contempt
or the indignation that betokens a sense of superiority. This
suggests the wisdom of the author of the Nicamachean Ethics,
in replacing (in Book VII) the simple antithesis of virtue-vice
with the wider horizon which includes heroic virtue and bestiality.
Within the sphere of virtue-vice, praise and blame imply superi-
ority and inferiority. But there is a region, beyond that embraced
by virtue, in which failure does not necessarily involve blame or
inferiority. 25 However, to treat the Washingtonians as tragic
heroes could only be an act of cosmic condescension or Olympian
humor.

Lincoln's argument in the passage under consideration partakes,
albeit on a different level, of the same tacit irony which we saw
in the Gettysburg Address, when he said that the world would
Tittle note nor long remember." When Lincoln says here that "such

TEACHING: POUHCAL MODERATION 265

of us as have never fallen victims, have been spared more from
absence of appetite," he says what was literally true of himself
in respect to whisky, but not to a far more dangerous intoxicant.
We have heard Lincoln, in the Lyceum speech, warn of a passion,
as naturally powerful in his own blood as in that of any man,
which "thirsts and burns for distinction." The passion for political
fame might be gratified as Caesar, Alexander, or Napoleon grati-
fied it, by destroying republics; or it might be gratified as our
Founding Fathers did, by constructive works, such as find-
ing a "solution of the long-mooted problem, as to the capability
of man to govern himself." In the earlier speech Lincoln had
indicated that he regarded himself as the heir of the work of
the Founding Fathers but that the discharge of his trust might
require virtue transcending even that of the Founding Fathers.
For they were lured by the pleasing hope, the fond desire, of
that immortality of fame which their work in fact achieved for
them. But Lincoln showed the possibility that their work could
be preserved only if there were those who, though worthy of
equal fame, might have to prove this worth by the silent sacrifice
of fame. But the man who can thus hold even fame in contempt
must be able to hold the value of human opinion in contempt. He
must, in a sense, be above mankind. So here, it would seem, Lin-
coln's indulgent attitude toward moral weakness is not the conde-
scension of compassion but the condescension of a godlike sense
of superiority which does not hold other men to a standard which
it imposes on itself. For Lincoln has already maintained that it
is rational knowledge which alone can guide a movement which,
however much of "genius and generosity" there has been in it,
has nonetheless been largely a child of fortune. But Lincoln has
also shown us his deliberate refusal to exploit that movement for
narrow political advantage and his dissociation from those who
would. The words by which Lincoln classifies himself among those
whose "virtue" is due to lack of temptation are but symptomatic
of that larger act of self-denial, to which the whole address is
witness and which belies those words.

There is, moreover, little doubt that universal public opinion,
Lincoln's chief witness against the old reformers in his denuncia-
tion of their injustice, does not favor his own explicit argument
in favor of joining a reformed drunkards' society. For the same
universal opinion which sanctioned the use of intoxicants and re-
garded its abuse more as a misfortune than a crime also sanctioned

266 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

the exclusion of habitual drunkards from polite society. The
common-sense view of the matter was neither that of ihe old
reformers with their theological thunder nor the social and moral
egalitarianism Lincoln seems to recommend here. One can treat
drunks, reformed and unreformed, with tolerance and humanity
and still draw the conventional moral and social distinctions con-
cerning them. How valid these distinctions are may perhaps be
better appreciated if we restate Lincoln's argument in more radi-
cal form. For although the Washingtonians were themselves
concerned only with one kind of incontinence, their principle
would apply equally to all.

By the Washingtonians, this system of consigning the habitual
drunkard to hopeless ruin, is repudiated. They adopt a more
enlarged philanthropy . . . They teach hope to ail despair
to none. As applying to their cause, they deny the doctrine
of unpardonable sin. As in Christianity it is taught, so in this
they teach, that

"While the lamp holds out to burn,
The vilest sinner may return."

Since the Gospel also offers thieves and f omicators hope of salva-
tion, we should, if Lincoln's argument were valid, be as ready
to join societies of the supposedly reformed among these as of
reformed drunkards. 26 But I think it is clear, from all that we
know of the human nature to which Lincoln has recourse for his
key argument, that this is absurd. That the kingdom of heaven
will draw no distinction between the salvation achieved by life-
long sinners and lifelong saints (unless it rejoices more for the
former than for the latter) is no sufficient ground for rejecting
the moral and social distinction drawn by natural reason between
these classes. 27 Universal public opinion sees no contradiction be-
tween praying in the same church with publicans and sinners
while abstaining from their company outside of it. There will be
time enough for that in the life to come.

We have already given our considered judgment that Lincoln
did not seriously believe that non-drinkers should join a reformed
drunkards' society. The movement properly belonged to the
alcoholics alone, and the intrusion of outsiders, far from bringing
new success, was bound to make it the game of other ambitions.
Lincoln was, however, speaking to a reformed drunkards' society.
When considering all the kindly things he says about the Washing-

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 267

tonians, one must not forget that he is speaking directly to them.
He could hardly have taken the position that it was a dishonor
to be one of them. The egalitarianism of the kingdom of heaven
already existed to a limited extent in the principle of American
democracy, in which one man had one vote, irrespective of virtue.
Of this fact Lincoln the politician was prudently aware. Yet Lin-
coln could have pointed out many other ways in which non-
drinkers might, by sympathy, generosity, and kindly acts, aid the
cause of reform. Instead he chose to raise, in an acute form, the
issue of the necessary proportion between virtue and full member-
ship in a good society. By his bad arguments he shows how Utopian
it is that "good" men should be asked to join a society of "inferior"
men. By this he shows still more the truth of the converse: if
"good" men are "disqualified" by their goodness from a society
of their inferiors, how much more true is it that the "inferior" are
disqualified by their inferiority from a society of the "good"? How
bad Lincoln must have thought his overt arguments in this section
we may glean from the testimony of a silent witness: Lincoln
himself never joined the Washingtonians. 28 In concluding this dis-
cussion we may then say that the sense of superiority which the
virtuous man feels toward those of lesser virtue, and which we
have called, perhaps somewhat harshly, contempt, is not repudi-
ated by Lincoln. For the hierarchic moral and social distinctions
to which this sense of superiority gives rise are implicit in the
consciousness of virtue, a consciousness indispensable to virtue,
and hence indispensable to the constitution of a good society. 29

We now return to Lincoln's thematic discussion of the relation
of justice to universal public opinion. You will recall that Lincoln
had said that the old-school reformers were unjust in their
condemnation of drinking because it had been sanctioned by
general opinion. The argument consisted of three parts. In the
first Lincoln set forth the evidences of this opinion in the universal
practice of using intoxicants ( "From the sideboard of the parson,
down to the ragged pocket of the houseless loafer, it was con-
stantly found"). In the second he interpreted this opinion from
the manner in which people referred to both the good and the ill
which came from drinking (". . . none seemed to think the injury
arose from the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very
good thing"). In the third he evaluated such opinion. It is to this

268 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

third part of Lincoln's discussion of the justice of universal opin-
ion that we now turn.

The universal sense of mankind, on any subject, is an argu-
ment, or at least an influence, not easily overcome. The
success of the argument in favor of the existence of an over-
ruling Providence, mainly depends upon that sense; and men
ought not, in justice, to be denounced for yielding to it in
any case, or for giving it up slowly, especially, where they
are backed by interest, fixed habits, or burning appetites.

It will be observed that Lincoln does not say that whatever
universal public opinion pronounces right is right but rather that
no one can be justly denounced for following it Clearly Lincoln
believed that universal public opinion can change (". . . is it won-
derful that some should think and act now, as att thought and
acted twenty years ago?") and hence that it can contradict itself.
But to be capable of transcending such opinion means, in effect,
to be capable of living without self-contradiction, something cer-
tainly beyond the power of most men. And no one can be held
responsible for what is not in his power.

To understand Lincoln's attachment to public opinion it is
necessary only to remind ourselves again of the larger meaning
of his career. This is shadowed forth as well in the Temperance
Address as in any speech of Lincoln's prior to Gettysburg.

If the relative grandeur of revolutions shall be estimated by
the great amount of human misery they alleviate, and the
small amount they inflict, then indeed, will this be the
grandest the world shall ever have seen. Of our political
revolution of '76 we all are justly proud. It has given us a
degree of political freedom, far exceeding that of any other
of the nations of the earth. In it the world has found a solu-
tion of the long-mooted problem, as to the capability of man
to govern himself. In it was the germ which has vegetated,
and still is to grow and expand into the universal liberty of
mankind.

The revolution of '76 meant, as we all know, the revolution
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. But
it also meant the revolution which insisted that governments de-
rive their just powers from the consent of the governed alone.
And, as the Gettysburg Address was to show, the consent of the

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 269

governed and the opinion of the governed were understood by
Lincoln to mean the same thing. Yet there is a tension between
the doctrine of human equality and the requirement that the opin-
ion of the governed shall rule. In a later chapter we shall propound
at greater length the significance of this tension in Lincoln's
thought. For the present we note that equality and consent
coincide in the agreement that, because men are by nature po-
litically equal, majority rule is the right way of deciding political
questions. But the right way of deciding does not necessarily pro-
duce right decisions. For the majority may even act to destroy
the basis of its own legitimacy by repudiating the proposition that
all men are created equal. This, of course, is what Lincoln one
day believed threatened when, with the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise and the Dred Scott decision, the nation appeared
on the verge of turning its back on the Declaration of Independ-
ence. Without enlightened leadership, capable of enlisting people
in the service of a principle higher than their own selfish interests,
a leadership which would prevent them from incorporating
injustice into those opinions which, by their universality, became
the foundation of most men's sense of justice, popular government
would not be worth saving. Yet the attempt to enlist men in the
service of a higher principle is itself fraught with the gravest
danger. The old reformers would plant a theocratic seed in the
heart of reform opinion, a seed which could, in Lincoln's judg-
ment, choke liberty. But the Washingtonian movement, and all
movements akin to it, could also lead to the same result. For the
attempt in a modern democracy to make moral reform a subject
of partisan politics could be fatal, both to political life and to
morality. Let us try to understand why this is so.

First let us observe that Lincoln says that the revolution of '76
"has found" a solution to the problem of man's capability to govern
himself. Now the term "self-government" has from antiquity been
understood in the double sense of referring both to political self-
government and moral self-government. In the political sense it
seems rather to be metaphorical, meaning governing and, in turn,
being governed by others. 80 However, self-rule may be spoken
of in a sense which is at least partially non-metaphorical when
applied to morality. For when a man rules his own passions it
is one part of himself which rules another. When Lincoln speaks
of the "Happy day, when, all appetites controlled, all passions
subdued . . . mind, all conquering mind, shall live and move the

27O POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

monarch of the world," he is speaking, hyperbole apart, of moral
virtue. It is not by accident, moreover, that Lincoln refers to the
rule of the intellect over the passions as a monarchic rule. Man's
moral freedom is gained by the destruction of equality within the
soul of the individual, by the total subjection of many passions
and appetites to one mind. Political freedom, on the contrary, is
achieved by the overthrow of the subjection of the many to the
one. Egalitarianism, which is destructive of moral freedom, is in-
dispensable to political freedom, and vice versa. If, therefore,
moral reform becomes the object of politics, if politics is "mor-
alized," so that the emancipation of man, the goal of the political
revolution, is reinterpreted to mean the regeneration of man, it
will mean the re-establishment in authority of the monarchic
principle. Moreover, this authority will be far greater than before,
because the reintroduction of the monarchic principle, under
democratic auspices, will introduce a far different despotism than
that which the revolutions of '76 and '89 overthrew. When the
people insist that the people become regenerate, when what is
required is not good behavior but purity, then the requirement
for participation in political life will have drastically changed.
For in the work of regeneration only the pure can take part. Once
a democratic government convinces itself, or permits itself to be
convinced, that the work of regeneration has been committed to
it, then it must cut itself off from the contamination of the
unregenerate. How inescapable is the compulsion to escape the
contamination of the unregenerate Lincoln's inner argument has
amply demonstrated. The moralizing of politics in this sense can
only lead to a secular version of the theocratic despotism which
Lincoln warned against in the case of the old reformers. Only,
in the latter case we could discern in the background the despot-
ism of Cromwell or Massachusetts Bay. In the foreground we can
discern Lenin and Stalin.

That Lincoln did not believe in the "moral revolution" which
he celebrates in such extravagant language at the end of the
Temperance Address is indicated not only by the excesses of the
rhetoric. He says, as noted, that the world has already found a
solution of the problem of self-government in the principles of
'76. From this germ, he says, "the universal liberty of mankind"
is "still to grow and expand." Now it was axiomatic to the Found-
ing Fathers, as it had been to Plato in antiquity, that political
government was necessary only because and in so far as the pas-

TEACHING: POLITICAL MODERATION 2J1

sions, the requirements of the body, played a role in human
motivation. ". . . what is government," wrote Hamilton and
Madison, "but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If
men were angels, no government would be necessary." And what
was an angel but a being ruled by mind, because his substance
was purely intellectual? If the day which Lincoln hails ever came,
when "all matters subjected," mind alone ruled, then men would
indeed be angelic, political government would be at an end, and
the state would wither away. If political government were thus
essentially supererogatory, Lincoln could never have regarded the
revolution of '76 as decisive for the problem of self-government.
He would, like Marx, have regarded it only as a preparation for
the true revolution.

It will be recalled that Lincoln spoke, a bare twenty years ear-
lier, of a universal public opinion as favorable to the practice of
using intoxicating drink. This, it should be noted, leaves a genera-
tion to spare, between 1776 and 1842. The pristine age of political
freedom was wholly unconcerned with what is now called by Lin-
coln the moral revolution. Lincoln ends the Temperance Address
with a dazzling invocation of the name of Washington, "the
mightiest name of earth long since mightiest in the cause of civil
liberty; still mightiest in moral reformation." If we had any doubt
that the revolution of '76, which occurred by Lincoln's chronology
forty-six years before the temperance revolution began, had
solved the moral problem of self-government, so far as that prob-
lem can be solved by political action, this should put it to rest.
For if Washington's name is "still mightiest in moral reformation,"
then it was mightiest before the temperance revolution began. If
the Washingtonians, appropriating the name of the Father of their
country, had added to his fame, it would have been "now
mightiest in moral reformation." But the work of moral reform
undertaken since the revolutionary era, of which the temperance
movement was symptomatic, was not viewed by Lincoln as repre-
senting any advance upon the work of the Founders.

The age which gave birth to both the temperance and abolition
movements was an age of optimism, of utopianism, of impatience
with the imperfections of man's state. The era ushered in by the
Declaration of Independence was looked upon by many not as
the consummation of the long struggle for political freedom, and
against feudalism and superstition, but as an invitation to wage

272 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF A YOUNG WHIG

total war against the imperfections of the human condition* For
Lincoln too the Declaration was a promise as well as an achieve-
ment. The doctrine of human equality, the idea that all should
have an equal chance in the pursuit of happiness, expressed an
aspiration toward which human life must ever struggle. But Lin-
coln also saw in the requirement of consent a requirement that
that struggle must ever come to terms with the actual conditions
of human imperfection, ignorance, and fallibility. To think that
we can not only safeguard ourselves from tyranny but rid our-
selves of folly would have been regarded by him as the greatest
folly.

The mid-nineteenth century was gripped by the idea of
progress and the assurance that the later age would be the best.
The dangerous delusion was taking hold of men's minds that, since
the upward direction of social change was assured, success would
ever trammel up the consequences of evil means. It was no longer
necessary to restrain one's impatience in dealing with evil. If
the cause was right, everything could be permitted. Lincoln, to
the extent that he was Utopian, was Utopian rather in the manner
of the ancients, placing the golden age not in the future but in
the past. He constantly found that "we are not what our fathers
were." His later struggle to restore our "ancient faith" that "all
men are created equal" is sufficiently well known. In the Tem-
perance Address we see a paradigm of that coming struggle. We
see, moreover, a diagnosis of the totalitarian impulse within the
heart of modern egalitarianism of surpassing brilliance.

Part IV

THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

Chapter XI

The Legal Tendency toward Slavery
Expansion

THERE is no better illustration of the moral confusion in contem-
porary historical literature on the Lincoln-Douglas debates than
Allan Nevins's conflicting judgments concerning the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise. In his chapter on the Kansas-Nebraska Act
he bitterly condemns Douglas, as we have seen, as a man of dim
moral perceptions who, feeling no repugnance for slavery himself,
could not fathom the depths of anti-slavery feeling in the free
states. However, in the final chapter of his four massive volumes,
in a review of the causes of the Civil War which gives full
prominence to the repeal as the first of a series of ill-fated steps,
Kevins has this to say: "Had an overwhelming majority of Ameri-
cans been ready to accept the squatter sovereignty principle, this
law might have proved a statesmanlike stroke; but it was so cer-
tain that powerful elements North and South would resist it to
the last that it accentuated strife and confusion." 1 One would have
thought, from the earlier condemnation of Douglas in effecting
the repeal, that northern anti-slavery opinion was right in reject-
ing a doctrine professing indifference to the morality of slavery
and that, had an overwhelming majority of Americans accepted
such a position, it would have been not a statesmanlike stroke
but a calamity. Nevins appears very close to endorsing the view
that what is acceptable to the overwhelming majority is right,
that slavery is right where an overwhelming majority desire it
and wrong where they reject it; in short, that Douglas's popular
sovereignty was the true doctrine.

276 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

In still another place Nevins observes that "by the late spring
of 1858, [Douglas] could feel that as a champion of honesty and
democratic principle he had won a memorable triumph . . . The
Leoompton constitution was as dead as the Yazoo Fraud. His vic-
tory was a moral triumph . . ."* But the fight against Lecompton,
as far as Douglas was concerned, was a fight entirely on a popular-
sovereignty basis. From the beginning to the end of that fight
he had asserted that his only aim was to see that the constitution
of Kansas should be the act and deed of the people of Kansas,
not the work of outsiders, whether emigrant-aid societies, border
ruffians, or the President and Congress of the United States, nor,
of course, a fraudulent minority masquerading as a majority. If
Douglas's victory was truly a moral triumph, if, that is, it did
not produce morally desirable results incidentally or accidentally,
then it was as much a victory over the free-soil opinion which
had condemned him in 1854 as it was a victory over Buchanan's
vicious Directory. In truth, Douglas had brought the majority of
the free-soil North to the point of accepting popular sovereignty,
and it was precisely this imminent possibility that Abraham Lin-
coln in the spring of 1858 regarded as the greatest disaster that
could befall the American people.

Now let us again examine the question raised in the first chapter
of this work. Was there no substantial difference between Lin-
coln's policy and Douglas's at the time of the great debates?
Would Douglas's policy have produced freedom as surely as
Lincoln's? Would the country have been as well advised to adopt
the popular-sovereignty formula for dealing with the slavery
issue? What confronts us first of all is Lincoln's massive insistence
that the spread of slavery be halted by a principle that treated
slavery as wrong everywhere. Was this insistence doctrinaire or
opportunistic? No one was, in general, more prone than Lincoln
to follow that dictate of prudence by which one attempts always
to remove evils without shocking the prejudices that support
themallowing time and circumstances to wear down the preju-
dice. We shall see that this was implicit in the gradualism with
which Lincoln approached all concrete questions of reform. Al-
though Lincoln thought all sound policy was based on an
"abstract truth" of universal applicability, he also denounced
"pernicious abstractions" that set people by the ears for no practi-
cally good ends. But Douglas's doctrine of allowing the people of

LEGAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY 277

a territory to decide whether or not they wanted slavery was not,
in Lincoln's eyes, a formula for avoiding a dispute that had no
practical consequences. It was a formula for depriving the North
of its moral armor against slavery extension, extension which was
threatening to engulf "aH, the States, old as well as newNorth as
well as South." Professor Kevins has denounced Lincoln's warn-
ing, in the house divided speech, that "we shall lie down pleasantly
dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making
their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead that the
Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State" as an "absurd
bogey." 8 Professor Randall, in gentler but firmer language, dis-
misses Lincoln's fears as "imaginary," "extremely unlikely," and
based upon "something of a non-sequitur." 4 If these learned gen-
tlemen are correct, if Lincoln's prediction of the real danger of
the spread of slavery was simply nonsense, then Lincoln was, as
we have said, either knave or fool: fool for not seeing what is so
obvious to the professors, or a monster of wickedness for deliber-
ately risking the peace of the nation. No defense of Lincoln is
possible that agrees with this judgment

The rhetorical heart of the speech 5 with which Lincoln began
the memorable campaign of 1858 and which gave an intensely
personal tone to the joint debates is the charge of a conspiracy to
nationalize slavery between Douglas, Taney, Pierce, and Bu-
chanan (the four "workmen," "Stephen, Roger, Franklin, and
James"). The idea of such a plot is treated by Professor Randall
as "quite fanciful and non-existent," 6 and he apparently regards
it a charity to Lincoln to pass over his evidence without examina-
tion. Professor Nevins does take some slight cognizance of the
evidence supporting Lincoln's charge but regards it as a "partisan
conclusion," which, "in the eyes of posterity, was pitched on a
disappointingly low plane." 7 He seems to think Lincoln was
foolish to give Douglas the opportunity to fling at him the words
"infamously false" and to declare "that he [Douglas] had never
exchanged one word with Taney or Pierce on the Dred Scott
decision and had not spoken of it to Buchanan until long after
it was made." Nevins seems to have taken Douglas's word and
unhesitatingly pronounces the accusation "unfounded." 8 Yet in his
own chapter on the Dred Scott decision, Nevins cites an exten-
sive correspondence between Judge Catron and President-elect
Buchanan, a correspondence in which Judge Grier joined and
which the Chief Justice is said in the correspondence to have seen.

2/8 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

Whether or not this amounted to collusion is a very fine point
of casuistry. But if Buchanan and Taney were in communication,
then it is altogether probable that Pierce was privy to what Bu-
chanan knew, since, as Lincoln noted, the outgoing President's
endorsement of the anticipated decision matched the incoming
President's advance exhortation in favor of it. That there was pre-
concert on the part of three of the four "conspirators" is heavily
implied in evidence Professor Nevins himself churns up. 9 In the
course of the debates Lincoln modified his original charge to the
extent that he admitted the possibility that Roger, Franklin, and
James might have used Stephen and that Douglas might have
been innocent of the intention imputed to the other three, but
not of the folly of contributing to their ends.

At the end of the famous exordium, with which the house di-
vided speech begins, wherein Lincoln warns of a crisis in which
it shall be decided whether the nation shall follow a path leading
to the ultimate extinction of slavery or to its legalization through-
out the nation, he concludes by asking, "Have we no tendency
to the latter condition?" This sentence is frequently overlooked.
But it is important to keep in mind that the evidence Lincoln
assembles in the speech is not so much evidence of a plot as it
is evidence of a tendency toward a condition in which slavery
shall be lawful everywhere in the United States. Lincoln was
careful then and thereafter to point out that he did not know a
conspiracy existed, only that he believed it. All his evidence, so
far as a plot is concerned, is circumstantial. Yet the vital question
which we must ask is not whether the circumstances overwhelm-
ingly suggest pre-concert among the principals concerned in
them but whether they overwhelmingly indicate a tendency to-
ward spreading slavery. Let us ask then first of all whether
Lincoln was reasonable in alleging such a tendency. If the answer
is affirmative, we may further inquire whether it was also reasona-
ble to assign as a cause of the tendency some kind of plot or
conspiracy.

We shall focus attention upon the two massive pillars of
evidence upon which Lincoln built his case. The first is the
Kansas-Nebraska Act; the second is the Dred Scott decision. The
Nebraska bill threw down the congressional prohibition of slavery
in the remaining Louisiana territory but asserted that it was its
"true intent and meaning . . . not to legislate slavery into any

LEGAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY 279

Territory or States, nor to exclude it therefrom; but to leave the
people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic
institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of
the United States." The ambiguity in the meaning of "subject only
to the Constitution'* left doubtful the meaning of "perfectly free
to form and regulate." Lincoln pointed out that opponents of the
bill (principally Chase) tried to have it amended "so as to ex-
pressly declare that the people of the Territory may exclude slav-
ery" but that its friends refused. We remark that in the joint
debates, when Lincoln reiterated this charge, Douglas replied that
Chase had only done this to obstruct the progress of the bill, that
Chase's amendment was unfair because he refused to have it said
that the people may exclude or introduce slavery. To this Lincoln
retorted that Douglas knew perfectly well that Chase's principles
forbade any countenancing of the right of slavery but that Doug-
las or one of his friends could have moved the addition of the
words that Chase refused.

Here we would remind the reader that in his January 4, 1854,
committee report, analyzed at length above, Douglas had enu-
merated the conflicting conceptions of the relation of the Constitu-
tion to slavery in the territories, both in 1850 and 1854. He there
noted the school which held that the Constitution protected every
citizen in his right to move into any territory, with any kind of
property whatever, "and to hold and enjoy the same under the
sanction of the law." And the Nebraska bill, in its earliest version,
incorporated the provisions of the 1850 laws which left the de-
cision of all constitutional questions to the Supreme Court. Thus
Douglas knew, or at least believed it possible, that the Supreme
Court might decide that "perfectly free" would not include the
power to exclude slavery. We cannot say, of course, and Lincoln
could not justly say, that Douglas knew in 1854 what the Court
would decide. But the possibility which became a reality in the
Dred Scott decision was distinctly contemplated in Douglas's
committee report. For in that 1854 report the view adopted by
Taney in 1857 is set forth as one of the interpretations of the
Constitution the Court might, under the terms of the act, be called
upon to adopt or reject. And Douglas must have known, as it
was generally known, that in any intersectional issue the Court's
membership would be markedly weighted toward the South. This
is an obstacle to the belief that, if Douglas was "used," he was
used unwittingly.

280 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

The Kansas-Nebraska Act threw down the Missouri Compro-
mise barrier to slavery extension. It encouraged the inference-
which, however, its author refused to permit to be made explicit
in the bill-that slavery might be either introduced or excluded
by the people who would go to live in the newly organized terri-
tories. Its author alleged that the purpose of removing the
congressional restriction was solely to enable these people to be
"perfectly free." When, however, the great decision in the case of
Dred Scott came, it turned out that "subject to the Constitution"
would permit "neither Congress nor a Territorial Legislature . . .
[to] exclude slavery I"

According to Lincoln, the most objectionable and danger-
ous feature of the Dred Scott decision was not that under it
"'squatter sovereignty' [was] squatted out of existence," because
the "perfect freedom" of the settlers to form their domestic
institutions proved to be exactly no freedom at all. The core of
the Dred Scott decision is found, above all, in the proposition that
a no negro slave, imported as such from Africa, and no descendant
of such slave can ever be a citizen of any State, in the sense of
that term as used in the Constitution of the United States." "This
point," said Lincoln, "is made in order to deprive the negro, in
every possible event, of the benefit of that provision of the United
States Constitution, which declares that 'the citizens of each State
shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens
in the several States/" Yet the immediate legal use made by the
Court of the foregoing dictum was of less ultimate significance
than was the evidence adduced by Taney to support it, evidence
culminating in the infamous phrase (which Lincoln did not
quote) that Negroes were "beings of [such] an inferior or-
der ... that they had no rights which the white man was
bound to respect." Taney, it is true, did not say that this was
what he believed to be true; he only insisted it was what
the Fathers of the Constitution believed and held himself
bound to give the Constitution such practical meaning as would
be justified by the intention of the Fathers. The consequence,
however, was that under the Constitution expounded by Taney
the Negro had no rights which federal courts would respect. Thus
the central tenet of the Dred Scott decision agreed perfectly with
the central tenet of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, according to which
it was a matter of indifference whether slavery was "voted up or

LEGAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY 281

voted down." For "voting up" slavery could not be indifferent to
anyone who believed the Negro was included in the Declaration
of Independence and was possessed of the same inalienable right
to liberty as the white man. What Douglas called the " 'sacred
right of self-government' . . . though expressive of the only right-
ful basis of any government, was so perverted in [Douglas's] at-
tempted use of it as to amount to just this: That if any one man,
choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to
object/' Certainly there was no power under the Constitution, as
interpreted by Taney and his coadjutors upon the Court, which
would enable any man to protect another man from enslavement
if that man was a Negro. Under the doctrine of the Court, Lincoln
pointed out, "whether the holding a negro in actual slavery in a
free State, makes him free, as against the holder, the United States
courts will not decide, but will leave to be decided by the courts
of any slave State the negro may be forced into by the master."
However, when Lincoln said that, according to popular sover-
eignty, if one man chooses to enslave another, no third man may
object, he picked his words with utmost precision. For the Negro
was a man, and Lincoln was entirely satisfied that the logic of
Douglas's popular sovereignty did not stop with the Negro. If the
white man did not respect the rights appertaining to the Negro's
humanity, he equally struck at his own. There was no principle,
we shall presently hear Lincoln argue, which justified enslaving
Negroes which did not at the same time justify enslaving whites.

In what way, however, did Lincoln think that the Dred Scott
decision might lead to the legalization of slavery in the free states?
We have already noted Lincoln's opinion that it denied Negroes
any real protection by federal courts. Thus it deprived them of
protection from kidnaping into slavery, unless they might find
that protection in the courts of slave states. But in judging the
possible future by the known past Lincoln was struck by the
strange wording in the declaratory section of the Kansas-
Nebraska Act, wherein was contained the assertion of the inten-
tion not "to legislate slavery into any Territory or State." What
business, Lincoln asked, had a mere territorial bill to speak of
the power of the people of a "State" to introduce or exclude slav-
ery? Indeed, in view of Douglas's long insistence that the
Congress of the United States had no power to regulate the
domestic institutions of a state, he should have been the last man

282 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

to have permitted, much less to have introduced, the implication
that it had such power. Yet the inference that Congress had such
a power can hardly be avoided when Congress declares that it
is its intention not to exercise such a power.

In the territorial legislation of 1850 Congress had said that
states formed from Utah and New Mexico might enter the Union
with or without slavery, as their constitutions might prescribe.
This, however, was no more than a declaration of how Congress
would receive applications for statehood from these quarters. In
like manner, the old Ordinance of '87 and the eighth section of
the Missouri Act of 1820 were declarations, in effect, first, that
the territories in question should be free as territories, and,
secondly, that applications for statehood from the respective areas
would not be entertained unless slavery was forbidden in the
constitutions accompanying the requests for admission. Congress
might use its undoubted power to admit or refuse to admit-
new states, to lay down conditions of admission. But the principle
of the equality of the states meant that Congress had no power
over states already admitted that it did not have over the original
states. In the Kansas-Nebraska Act, however, it was affirmed that
the people of any territory or state should be "perfectly free to
form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way,
subject only to the Constitution of the United States." The author
of the bill refused to have language incorporated in it spelling
out the meaning of "perfectly free," and he confessed that there
were opposing interpretations of the Constitution, among which
he would not decide, some of which would have reduced that
perfect freedom to a nullity. And now, as noted above, the
Supreme Court, to which the selfsame measure remanded all such
questions for decision, had declared such freedom to be a nullity
by denying that the Constitution to which territories and states
alike were subject permitted either Congress or territorial legis-
latures to exclude slavery. But the Court, although it had
every opportunity to do so in an opinion which has been widely
regarded as three-quarters obiter dictum did not affirm the
power of states to exclude slavery.

Although Professor Nevins utterly disbelieves that slavery
might have spread to the free states, he concedes that "J uc *g e
Nelson had hinted at constitutional restraints upon State power
over slavery." 10 Nelson had indeed insisted that the decision by
the highest court of Missouri, that Dred Scott's residence in

LEGAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY 283

Illinois did not make him free, was binding in federal court and
that the federal court might not question the competence of the
state court in such a matter. Then he spoke as follows: "In other
words, except in cases where the power is restrained by the Con-
stitution of the United States, the law of the State is supreme
over the subject of slavery within its jurisdiction. As a practical
illustration of the principle, we may refer to the legislation of
the free States in abolishing slavery, and prohibiting its introduc-
tion into their territories. Confessedly, except as restrained by the
Federal Constitution, they exercised, and rightfully, complete
and absolute power over the subject." 11 But what did the excep-
tion mean? Nelson had just asserted that the laws prohibiting
slavery in Illinois did not make Dred Scott free if he could be
forced to return to a slave state. Now, clearly, Dred Scott had
been held in Illinois as a slave. Could the state of Illinois have
prevented his owner from bringing him into the state? Could
anyone have gone into an Illinois court and secured a writ of
habeas corpus for Dred Scott? And, if the Illinois court had
declared him free, would an appeal carried to the Supreme Court
have upheld the Illinois court, or would the Taney court have
again declared that Dred Scott was a slave under Missouri law
and that either the full faith and credit clause or the privileges
and immunities clause of Article IV of the Constitution "re-
strained" the free state from thus depriving a citizen of Missouri
of his property? We do not know the answers to these questions,
but, in the light of the fate of the "perfect freedom" subject to
the Constitution granted to the people of Kansas and Nebraska
by the territorial act of 1854, can it be wondered that Lincoln
was suspicious of Nelson's "except as restrained by the Federal
Constitution"? Indeed, did not Nelson's exception, in the light
of this history, raise precisely the same degree and kind of doubt
concerning the constitutional powers of the states that Douglas's
original report raised concerning the powers of Congress in the
territories?

The Dred Scott decision had pronounced the eighth section
of the Missouri Act of 1820 unconstitutional by denying that
Congress had power to forbid slavery in any territory acquired
as the common property of the nation. We have already observed
that in 1820 "Monroe and all the cabinet [including John Quincy
Adams and John Calhoun] agreed that Congress could prohibit

284 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

slavery in a territory." 12 It is safe to say that, prior to the sharp
turn by the South toward the defense of slavery as a "positive
good" in the 1830*8, it would have been difficult to have found
anyone, even among the strict constructionists, who doubted the
power of Congress over slavery in the territories. The Taney
decision denied the validity of a law which had stood upon the
statutes of the country for thirty-four years, a law which Douglas
himself in 1849 had described as having an origin akin to that of
the Constitution, canonized in the hearts of the American people,
and as a sacred thing which no ruthless hand would ever be
reckless enough to disturb. But it did more. It denied that the
first Congress which sat under the Constitution and which had
re-enacted the Ordinance of '87the ordinance which had origi-
nally been drafted by Jefferson and which had forbidden slavery
in the old Northwest Territory had acted within the limits of
its constitutional competencel In this Congress, as Lincoln was
to point out in the Cooper Union speech, there were sixteen of
the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution, including James
Madison, and the measure "passed both branches without yeas
and nays, which is equivalent to unanimous passage." 13 It was
signed by President Washington, who did not, so far as we know,
have any doubt as to its constitutionality. Taney's argument ex-
plaining away the congressional prohibition of slavery in the
old Northwest is so tortured that it would require at least a chap-
ter to trace its many involutions. We will quote a single sentence,
however, which should suffice for present purposes: "It appears,
therefore, that this Congress regarded the purposes to which the
land in this territory was to be applied, and the form of govern-
ment and principles of jurisprudence which were to prevail there,
while it remained in the territorial state, as already determined
on by the States when they had full power and fight to make
the decision; and that the new government, having received it
in this condition, ought to carry substantially into effect the plans
and principles which had been previously adopted by the States,
and which no doubt the States anticipated when they surren-
dered their power to the new government." 14 When Taney speaks
of the previous action of the states, he refers to their joint action
under the Articles of Confederation. In short, Taney attempts to
justify the action of the first Congress, in adopting a law en-
forcing the slavery restriction in the Northwest Territory, on the
assumption that the Congress under the Articles of Confederation

LEGAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY 285

had greater power to govern territory than had the Congress under
the Constitution. We will not attempt to demonstrate, as Lincoln
hardly thought it worth demonstrating, that the Fathers of the
Constitution did not believe they were establishing a government
in any point less competent than that which subsisted under the
Articles. And if the action of the first Congress, which re-enacted
the Northwest Ordinance, was such a refined point of construction
as Taney makes it seem, it could hardly have passed, as Lincoln
notes, without yeas and nays. 15

To the foregoing we would also add that the case of Dred
Scott v. Sandford was the second in which the Supreme Court
had held invalid an act of Congress, the only other being that
of Marbury v. Madison, decided in 1803. But the case of Marbury
v. Madison was a far less unequivocal exercise of what is now
called judicial review. For Marshall had denied that Congress
had the right to add to the original jurisdiction of the Supreme
Court; he was insisting on the right of the Court to decide
the meaning of the grant of power to it in the Constitution. It
was not dear beyond a doubt that he asserted an equal power
to determine the powers granted to the other branches of the
government by the Constitution. In the course of the joint de-
bates, Lincoln cited both Jefferson and Jackson to the effect that
the policy of the United States government, on political ques-
tions, might not be established by the judges. Jackson had repeat-
edly refused to accept the opinion of the high court on the
constitutionality of the Bank of the United States as binding on
himself. Each officer of the Constitution is sworn to uphold it
as he understands it, Jackson had said. Although Marshall had
in the Marbury case used broad language to defend the invalida-
tion of a very narrow area of legislation, the question involved
in the case was, from a political standpoint, moot. Taney's
decision had a vastly different bearing. The demand for the
restoration of the Missouri Compromise slavery restriction was at
that time the only real unifying force in the Republican party,
the absolute sine qua non of its continued political existence.
The election of 1856 had revealed that the Democratic party
was now a minority party in the nation as far as the presidential
vote was concerned. The Whig and Know-Nothing parties were
breaking up rapidly, and it was highly probable that the Re-
publican party would become the majority party in the not very
distant future. The Republican party appeared to be on the

286 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

threshold of overthrowing the hegemony of the Democratic party,
as neither the Federalists nor Whigs had ever threatened to do.
The elections of 1856 carried the clear portent of an impending
realignment of political strength in the nation, such as had not
happened since 1800. And the decision in the case of Dred Scott,
coining hard on the heels of those portents, was a declaration
that the election of a Republican administration would be the
election of a party dedicated to the overthrow of the Constitution
i.e., the Constitution as seen by Taney. Such a decision went
far beyond anything implied in Marshall's opinion in the Marbury
v. Madison case. It would have been a more just analogy if
Marshall had declared that the repeal of the Judiciary Act of
1801 by Jefferson's party had been unconstitutional. Marshall
never had a fair opportunity to express himself officially on this
matter, and we cannot know whether he would have dared such
an opinion. Yet even such a decision would not have been a
summons to Jefferson to disband his party and hand the reins
of government back to the Federalists. The Dred Scott decision
was nothing less than a summons to the Republicans to disband.
In the light of this history it can hardly be doubted that the Dred
Scott decision was the revolution in constitutional law Lincoln
asserted it to be and that the acceptance of that decision as
politically binding would have been as much an abnegation of
the principles of popular government as were the doctrines of
nullification and secession.

Lincoln's ever-repeated theme throughout the debates was that
in a popular government statutes and decisions are rendered pos-
sible or impossible of execution by public sentiment. It is in
reference to such sentiment that legislatures and courts determine
what they may and may not attempt. Lincoln did not believe
that Taney's court would have had either the incentive or the
temerity to pronounce the decision of 1857 ^ ^54- First the
Missouri Compromise had to be repealed; second, the doctrine
of popular sovereignty, so called, erected into a campaign plank
and an election carried under that obscure banner. Next the
people had to be taught that, in re-electing the Democrats to
office, they had endorsed the constitutional opinion which had
repealed die Missouri Compromise and which had looked upon
the congressional power to restrict slavery in the territories as
somehow improper, if not positively unlawful. Only when the old

LEGAL TENDENCY TOWABD SLAVERY 287

idea of the moral objectionableness of slavery, an idea enshrined
in the Missouri Compromise, as it had been earlier enshrined in
the Northwest Ordinance, had been replaced by the idea of the
moral indifference of slavery could the Court have attempted
what it did attempt. Only as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the
party strategy which utilized it to change public sentiment, had in
a measure succeeded was the Dred Scott decision deemed possi-
ble of execution and hence worth attempting. It was Lincoln's con-
tention, therefore, that if the Dred Scott decision could receive
the endorsement at the polls which the Kansas-Nebraska Act had
received or, it should be said, of such an appearance of endorse-
ment as Douglas and Buchanan claimed for it from the results
of the '56 electionsthen still further revolutions might well be
in store. Lincoln did not say that another Dred Scott decision
impended, but he said that the acquiescence of public sentiment
in the principles of the Dred Scott decision, which struck down
the power either of Congress or the people of a territory to exclude
slavery, would lay a firm foundation for another such decision.
Once the idea of the sacrosanct character of property in slaves
was firmly established, then indeed there might be another de-
cision, which would declare that no state had the power to
prohibit slavery. Such a decision might appear intolerable and
unenforcible now, Lincoln conceded. But did it appear more
intolerable and unenforcible than the decision denying Congress
the right to prohibit slavery in the territories would have appeared
to Jefferson, Washington, Madison, either of the Adamses, or
Monroe? If one such change could be effected, why could not
another? That such a change was in fact definitely prepared by
the Dred Scott decision Lincoln demonstrated, not in the house
divided speech, but in the course of the joint debates.

At Galesburg, on October 7, 1858, Lincoln reinforced his charge
as to the danger in the Dred Scott decision in the following
words:

In the second clause of the sixth article ... of the Con-
stitution of the United States, we find the following language:
"This Constitution and the laws of the United States which
shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made,
or which shall be made, under the authority of the United
States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges
in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Con-

288 THE CASE FOR UNCOLN

stitution or kws of any State to the contrary notwithstand-
ing/'

The essence of the Dred Scott decision is compressed into
the sentence which I will now read: "Now, as we have already
said in an earlier part of this opinion, upon a different point,
the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly
affirmed in the Constitution." I repeat it, "The right of prop-
erty in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the
Constitution!" What is it to be "affirmed" in the Constitution?
Made firm in the Constitution so made that it cannot be
separated from the Constitution without breaking the Con-
stitution; durable as the Constitution, and part of the Consti-
tution. Now, remembering the provision of the Constitution
which I have read; affirming that that instrument is the
supreme law of the land; that the Judges of every State
shall be bound by it, any law or constitution of any State to
the contrary notwithstanding; that the right of property in
a slave is affirmed in that Constitution, is made, formed into,
and cannot be separated from it without breaking it; durable
as the instrument; part of the instrument; what follows as
a short and even syllogistic argument from it? I think it fol-
lows, and I submit to the consideration of men capable of
arguing, whether as I state it, in syllogistic form, the argument
has any fault in it?

Nothing in the Constitution or laws of any State can destroy
a right distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution
of the United States.

The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly
affirmed in the Constitution of the United States.

Therefore, nothing in the Constitution or laws of any State
can destroy the right of property in a slave. 16

Douglas never met the argument that Lincoln thus presented in
syllogistic form, and to our knowledge it has not been met by
anyone who has denied the force of its conclusion. Lincoln said
he could see no flaw in the reasoning, that the conclusion was
inescapable, assuming the truth of the premises. The flaw was in
the premises. "I believe that the right of property in a slave is not
distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution," 17 he said.
His third question to Douglas at Freeport had been, "If the
Supreme Court of the United States shall decide that States can-
not exclude slavery from their limits, are you in favor of acquiesc-

LEGAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY 289

ing in, adopting, and following such decision as a rule of political
action?" 18 And Douglas had replied "that such a thing is not
possible. It would be an act of moral treason that no man on
the bench could ever descend to/' 19 Professor Nevins uses almost
the same language when he calls Lincoln's prediction that the
Supreme Court might make Illinois a slave state an a absurd
bogey/' For "no court would have dared such folly/' 20 But, we
may ask Professor Nevins, even as Lincoln asked Douglas, how
do we know that the judges who were capable of the Dred Scott
decision would not have been capable of this additional folly?
If Taney had dared the major and the minor, why would he not
have dared the conclusion? It was Lincoln's thesis that the change
in constitutional law already effected by the Dred Scott decision
was not notoriously greater than the one which he anticipated
as a further consequence of the premises it established. Lincoln
granted that no Court would have yet dared such a folly; what
he contended was that the premises justifying such a conclusion
were contained in Taney's Dred Scott decision and, if they re-
mained fixed in the law as premises, then it was only a matter
of time until public sentiment, having accustomed itself to the
premises, would acquiesce in the conclusion. When public senti-
ment permitted such a decision to be executed, he did not doubt
that it would be forthcoming.

Professor Randall, without addressing himself very directly to
Lincoln's precise syllogism, has also denounced its conclusion.
"When Lincoln spoke in 1858, his declaration that the Taney
property doctrine of 1857 might some day lead to a Federal
imposition of slavery upon all the states, was something of a
non-sequitur," he writes. "Few constitutional lawyers would con-
tend that the domain of the fifth amendment included the vastly
broader field of the fourteenth. That a future Supreme Court
would ever rule that the Federal government could impose slavery
upon unwilling states was extremely unlikely. Such a doctrine
would have been opposed where Northern states prohibited
slavery and in the South because of state-rights principles." 21 But
Professor Randall's allegation of a nan sequitur, so far as it is
meant to apply to Lincoln's syllogism, is open to the following
objection. The minor premise, which Lincoln drew from Taney's
opinion, does not rest upon the Fifth Amendment. After the
sentence Lincoln quoted from the opinion, Taney continued, "The
right to traffic in it [i.e., slave property], like an ordinary article

THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

of merchandise and property, was guaranteed to the citizens of
the United States, in every State that might desire it, for twenty
years. And the government in express terms is pledged to protect
it in all future time, if the slave escapes from his owner/' Thus
it is the first clause of Section 9 of Article I of the Constitution,
which says that "The migration or importation of such persons
as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit,
shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one
thousand eight hundred and eight . . ." and the third clause of
Section 2 of Article IV, which says, "No person held to service
or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into
another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein,
be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered
up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may
be due,* which forms the alleged basis of Taney's assertion that
the right to property in slaves is expressly affirmed in the Con-
stitution. The portion of Taney's opinion just quoted above
continues: This is done in plain words too plain to be mis-
understood. And no word can be found in the Constitution which
gives Congress greater power over slave property, or which
entitles property of that kind to less protection than property of
any other description. The only power conferred is the power
coupled with the duty of guarding and protecting the owner in
his rights." Now it is clear that Taney did not mean to infer
from the purely negative expressions of the Fifth Amendment,
which prohibit depriving a person of his life, liberty, or property
without due process of law, the positive duty to guard and protect
the slaveowners in their rights. Taney had previously given the
Fifth Amendment as a reason why Congress might not deprive
men of slave property who had migrated with that property to
federal territories. But although he says that slave property is
entitled to no less protection than any other, he does not say
that it is not entitled to greater protection. We see here the same
kind of ambiguity as in "subject to the Constitution" or "except
as restrained by the Federal Constitution." The niche is open,
as Lincoln said it was, for a still more privileged position for
slavery. There is no doubt that Taney's expression about "guard-
ing and protecting slave property gave great impetus to the
southern demand for a congressional slave axle in the territories,
a demand which was to split the Democratic party in 1860. For
the moment we emphasize that Taney's assertion that the Consti-

LEGAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY 2Q1

tution expressly affirms the right to slave property, and by this
reason enjoins a duty to protect slave property, rests mainly upon
a construction of Section 2, Article IV, and does not depend upon
the Fifth Amendment at all. And this assertion, combined with
the supremacy clause, certainly does yield, as a logical necessity,
the conclusion that no state may destroy the right of property
in a slave.

However, if the Fifth Amendment were involved in Lincoln's
syllogism, as it is not, we may still wonder at Randall's assertion
that "few constitutional lawyers" would include the domain of
the Fourteenth Amendment in that of the Fifth. Clearly he is
thinking of lawyers in the mid-twentieth century, but our ques-
tion concerns the state of constitutional law in 1858, when the
Fourteenth Amendment had not yet been conceived. The reign-
ing constitutional opinion, without question, was Barron v.
Baltimore, delivered by Chief Justice Marshall in 1833. Marshall
had stated that the Fifth Amendment was intended solely as a
limitation on the federal government and not upon the states.
However, this fact by itself cannot tell us what decision would
have been rendered if a legal test had come twenty-five years
later. In this connection we cite the opinion of Professor Crosskey,
in a recent essay on "Constitutional Limitations on State Au-
thority/' 22 According to his investigations, many lawyers and
judges, partly from ignorance and partly from a disagreement
with Marshall's opinion, did not accept it as a binding precedent.
There arose a long series of cases, of which Crosskey gives a
partial list, 28 "in which lawyers continued to invoke various pro-
visions of Amendments II- VIII against the states." "In 1840," he
writes, "in Holmes v. Jennison, the Barron decision was most
elaborately challenged in the Supreme Court itself, as erroneous.
In 1845, the Supreme Court of Illinois, apparently in ignorance
of the Barron case, observed . . . that the Due Process Clause
of the Fifth Amendment was 'obligatory upon all the States.' And
in 1852, the Supreme Court of Georgia denounced the Barron
decision in no uncertain terms and refused to be bound by it ...
And though nineteen years had passed since the decision of
Barron v. Baltimore, the Georgia Court said it was 'aware' the
question the case had involved was 'still regarded as an unsettled
one.' >>24 It is not necessary for the purpose of the present argu-
ment to enter into the merits of Professor Crosskey's broader
contentions, such as his view that the Fourteenth Amendment

292 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

was intended by its Republican authors to confirm the applica-
bility of amendments II to VIII to the states, an applicability they
always had believed (according to Crosskey) to exist. Certainly,
however, Barren v. Baltimore did not occupy the sacrosanct
position in public opinion that Douglas in 1849 ascribed to the
Missouri Compromise. If the pro-slavery impulse could in such a
short time have accomplished the overthrow of that mighty
barrier, with the treading under foot of the constitutional opinions
of the Fathers which had lain at its foundation, why might not
Barron v. Baltimore have also been overthrown? The record of
the Supreme Court in the decades after the Civil War in striking
down state interference with corporate property is notorious. The
Fourteenth Amendment was, of course, the text upon which the
Court then delivered its sermons. In the reconstruction era it was
more convenient for the Republicans to enact new amendments
than to trust to reinterpretations of old ones. But, had the struggle
of the fifties gone in favor of the party of Pierce and Buchanan,
whose administrations were dominated by such men as Jefferson
Davis and Jacob Thompson, why should it be supposed that
courts dominated by their appointees would have done less for
their favorite form of property than Republican courts did for
theirs?

Randall says that the South would have opposed Lincoln's
imaginary new Dred Scott decision because of state-right princi-
ples. Nothing was more improbable. In the decade before the
Civil War the South never turned to state-right principles except
to defend the institution of slavery. If state-right principles were
sacred to the South, it would not have demanded the rigorous
fugitive slave law it did. The Constitution says that fugitives "shall
be delivered up," but it does not say by whom. The clause in
question is not among the enumerated powers of Congress. There
is no a priori reason for thinking the delivering up of fugitives
was a federal and not a state function. And if "state-right princi-
ples" were principles, in any proper sense, then it was because
of some conception of the superior virtue of local autonomy. Yet
the South rejected Douglas as a party leader in 1860 precisely
because he insisted there ought not to be a federal slave code
for the territories.

But Randall also thinks that such a decision would have been
"opposed where Northern states prohibited slavery." If this as-
sertion means that a decision legalizing slavery would have been

LEGAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY 293

opposed where slavery was opposed, it is, of course, true, because
it is (practically) tautologous. But would there have been
continued opposition to slavery in the North if the Dred Scott
decision and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise were allowed
to stand? Here was the heart of the danger as Lincoln saw it.
Professors Randall and Nevins, like Douglas himself, believe it
"worse than folly" to think that slavery could have been extended
to any of the hitherto free states and territories by any combina-
tion of legal or political maneuvers. They believe Lincoln was
contending with a shadow, not substance; that the spread of
slavery by political means was out of the question, because
slavery could spread only where it was economically profitable
and that it had already reached its limits of profitability. We
shall examine this thesis shortly. For the present we assert that if
it were accepted as settled legal doctrine that the right to property
in slaves was "expressly affirmed" in the Constitution, there could
be no legal barrier to a future decision pronouncing slavery lawful
in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South.

Taney's dictum was a literal untruth: slave property was not
"expressly" affirmed in the Constitution because the words "slave"
or "slavery" do not even occur in that document (prior to the
Thirteenth Amendment). A "person held to service or labor"
might be an indentured servant as well as a slave. Further, such
persons are referred to in the Constitution as held not by virtue
of a right affirmed in the federal Constitution but under the
laws of a "State." Lincoln repeated over and over ( citing Preston
Brooks of South Carolina as a witness ) that, when the Constitu-
tion was framed, the Fathers believed that slavery would some
day become extinct, and, according to Lincoln (following Clay),
they deliberately refrained from using language which would
record the former existence of slavery under it when it had
vanished. Certainly the Fathers believed that the states had it
in their power to abolish slavery, yet when Taney spoke of the
fugitive slave clause as pledging the federal government to pro-
tect the slaveowner "in all future time," he used language which
strongly suggests a legal foundation of slavery in the Constitution
as distinct from the states. In short, a Constitution interpreted
by judges of Taney's persuasion might mean anything the interests
of the slave power required it to mean. The only security against
such interpretations lay in the election of a president who would
appoint judges of a different persuasion.

Chapter XII

The Political Tendency toward Slavery
Expansion

THAT there was legal "tendency* toward the spread of slavery
to all the states we may take as demonstrated Let us ask further
in what sense this legal tendency constituted a practical or
political tendency? Let us observe that in the house divided
speech Lincoln spoke only of slavery becoming lawful" in all
the states. His careful phraseology indicates, first of all, his
rejection of Douglas's thesis that the extension or non-extension
of slavery in America had never been materially affected by
general prohibitions or permissions of slavery. According to Lin-
coln, the legalization of slavery was decisively important for its
extension. He repeatedly cited Henry Clay to the effect that "one
of the great and just causes of complaint against Great Britain
by the Colonies, and the best apology we can now make for
having the institution amongst us," 1 was that the mother country
had refused to prohibit it and had withheld from the people
of the colonies the authority to prohibit it for themselves. In
addition, Lincoln pointed to the circumstantial evidence con-
nected with the old Northwest Ordinance. Douglas, we have seen,
ridiculed the notion that this ordinance had decided the freedom
of the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
The settlers who had gone there had decided against slavery
because they had decided it was not in their interest to have it.
But why had they so decided? Douglas was driven back on his
isothennic theory soil and climate made it unprofitable. But,
Lincoln pointed out, a large part of Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland,
and Delaware are as far north as parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illi-
nois. There was no great difference in soil or climate between the

POLITICAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY 2Q5

left bank and the right bank of the Ohio River, such as to decide
that slavery would come right up to the river's edge on the one
side and yet be nowhere seen on the other. There was then no
east-west boundary in nature, between free soil and slave soil,
of which the Northwest Ordinance was only a confirmation. Nor
was there a north-south line. For the state of Missouri stood
directly to the west of Illinois and shared in two thirds of the
latitude of that state. Moreover, as an added point we may note
that the heaviest concentration of slaves in Missouriareas having
more than 15 per cent slave population was in a line of counties
extending across the state from a point north of St. Louis. 2 In
point of latitude most of Missouri's slaves might have been in-
cluded in Illinois, Indiana, or Ohio. In his Ohio speeches after the
1858 campaign Lincoln added that Indiana and Ohio had both
(but particularly Indiana) petitioned Congress to remove or
suspend the anti-slavery provision of the ordinance, but the Con-
gress, acting on a report of John Randolph of Virginia, himself a
slaveholder, had refused. Hence it was not true that the men
of the territories under the Northwest Ordinance had paid no
attention to the slavery prohibition. In fact, they had sometimes
chafed under it. What Douglas's whole argument disregarded was
the influence the known existence of such a law might have had
in inducing men hostile to slavery to come to the Northwest and
in persuading men friendly to it to keep out.

It is true that in most of the early settlements north of the
Ohio River there was a preponderance of slave-state immigrants.
It is also true that the early history of Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana
is full of struggles between pro- and anti-slavery parties. This
proves no more than that the simple existence of the Northwest
Ordinance was not sufficient in itself to decide whether slavery
would ever be planted in these regions. But can it be doubted
that the existence of the slavery prohibition weighed in favor of
eventual freedom? Lincoln knew from personal experience that
many migrants across the Ohio from the South, like his own family,
preferred free soil as much as any migrants from New England,
that they had fled the degrading effects of competition with slave
labor and came to the Northwest expecting the promise of free
soil in the Northwest Ordinance to be respected. Further, there
can be no doubt that many slaveholders must have refrained
from bringing slaves into the territory because of the fear of losing
them. And, finally, there is the simple fact that, however tenuous

2<)6 THE CASE FOB LINCOLN

it might sometimes be, respect for law as such is a factor in
determining obedience to it

During the formative period of the old Northwest public
sentiment had, broadly speaking, endorsed the moral as well as
legal competence which had enshrined the slavery prohibition
in the Northwest Ordinance. It was widely known that Jefferson,
himself a slaveholding Southerner, had initiated the move for the
slavery prohibition in the Northwest The pro-slavery settlers had
then to conduct their political warfare with a heavy presumption,
compounded of morality and legality, against them. Lincoln's
argument in favor of the federal restriction of slavery in the
territories never relied on the effectiveness of law as such. It was
always an argument in favor of a law as an expression of the moral
sense of the people. The moral sense which condemned slavery
naturally demanded a law preventing its extension, and the de-
mand for the law was simultaneously a demand for the preserva-
tion of that moral sense. Lincoln was certain, not that the North-
west Ordinance as such had excluded slavery from the territory
north of the Ohio, but that the moral condemnation of slavery
which demanded and was embodied in the ordinance had kept
it out In the same way Lincoln believed that the Missouri Com-
promise slavery prohibition was at once both a moral and legal
condemnation of slavery. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
in Lincoln's eyes, did indeed throw down an important legal
barrier to slavery. But far more important was the implicit repeal
of the moral condemnation. It was this repeal which might in
time spread slavery to the free states as well as to the hitherto
free territories.

Professor Randall says that Douglas's program "would inevitably
have made Kansas free both as a territory by popular sovereignty
and as a state by constitutional processes." 8 But Randall's mon-
strous assumption is that popular sovereignty in Kansas would
have yielded the same result even if the mighty political up-
heaval which found expression in the Republican party had never
occurred or at least had never achieved the political effect it did
achieve. It was opposition to the repeal of the Missouri Com-
promise which gave birth to the party and which placed ninety-
odd Republicans in the House of Representatives in the Thirty-
fifth Congress. In the House, where the Lecompton fraud was
beaten Douglas could muster just three Democratic votes (in-

POLITICAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY 2Q7

eluding his own) against the Buchanan forces in the Senatethe
Republicans supplied nearly five votes for every one supplied
by Douglas Democrats. 4 In other words, Douglas's "success" in
making popular sovereignty work in Kansas in 1858 and 1861
depended upon the existence of a party committed to the
restoration of the Missouri Compromise slavery restriction, a party
utterly repudiating his version of popular sovereigntyl

Lincoln's insistence, in the house divided speech, that Douglas
was no fit leader of a party believing in the superiority of free
soil to slave soil was directed in large measure to those eastern
Republicans who rated Douglas's achievement high for having
led them to victory in the Lecompton fight. But Randall and
Nevins commit the same error Lincoln imputed to men like
Greeley. They fail to see that the nerve of the opposition to
Lecompton was not popular sovereignty but anti-slavery passion.
And this passion could not be sustained by a policy which didn't
care whether slavery was 'Voted up or voted down." It was the
determination that Kansas ought to be free, not that she ought
to have a constitution embodying the will of Kansans, that ulti-
mately assured freedom to Kansas. It is trivial that those who
believed Kansas ought to be free of necessity believed that the
constitution of Kansas should be the act and deed of Kansans,
but it is important to realize that the converse is not true. Douglas
claimed great credit for having fought the Buchaneers on the
Lecompton fraud, a credit which Professors Randall and Nevins
give him in unstinted measure. But, said Lincoln, the Lecompton
dispute was not one of principle but one of fact : one side asserted,
and the other denied, that the Lecompton Constitution was the
actual expression of the will of bona fide settlers. Buchanan men,
Douglas men, Republicans admitted that it should be such an
expression. "This being so ... is Judge Douglas . . . going to
spend his life maintaining a principle that nobody on earth op-
poses? Does he expect to stand up in majestic dignity, and go
through his apotheosis and become a god, in the maintaining of a
principle which neither a man nor a mouse in all God's creation is
opposing?" 5 Yet Lincoln held that the attempted betrayal of
Kansas by the Lecompton fraud was an outcome of the betrayal
of principle embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The repeal
of the Missouri Compromise was predicated upon the moral in-
difference of slavery and freedom and hence upon the moral
indifference of a constitution which expressed the will of Kansans

2g8 THE CASE FOB LINCOLN

because it embodied the equal natural rights of man and one
which denied these rights by sanctioning slavery. Douglas, like
Buchanan's pro-slavery advisers (Buchanan himself was but
a tool), only paid Up service to the principle that Kansas should
have a constitution of her own free choice. By the time that
Lecompton became a critical issue, opinion in the free states had
been so enraged by the aggression originally perpetrated by
Douglas's own Nebraska bill that it would have been political
suicide for Douglas to have done aught but resist Lecompton, in
company with the Republicans. But to have accepted Douglas
as a leader, because political expediency demanded that he throw
himself into the work of averting some of the consequences of
his own mischief, would have been arrant folly. The men who
opposed slavery in Kansas would have been helpless if there had
not been men in Congress, Republicans from the free states, with
the power of their votes to back up the free-soil Kansans. The
idea that the slavery issue could be left to be decided in the
territories themselves was demonstrated to be pure illusion by
the history of Lecompton. If there had been no anti-Nebraska
party in Congress no Republican party a slave constitution
would have been fastened upon Kansas, and Douglas could not
have done a thing about it even if he had wished to.

Lincoln's contention throughout the debates was, in brief, that
so long as Congress had the power to admit new states Congress
would have the decisive voice whether exercised affirmatively or
negatively as to whether a territory would be free or slave and
whether it entered the Union free or slave. Douglas's Kansas-
Nebraska Act left the number of inhabitants required for state-
hood entirely open, and Congress's discretion in deciding when
there were enough Kansans to form a state was in itself a lever
of great power in helping or hindering the contending parties
in Kansas. It could always decide that the time for statehood was
ripe whenever the party it wished to help happened to be in
the ascendant 8 In short, Douglas himself would have been help-
less against Buchanan in the Thirty-fifth Congress if a party had
not existed in the Congress, a party with the potentiality of con-
trolling the national government, which differed with Douglas
on principle. But to have accepted Douglas as a leader, or to have
weakened in any way the purpose to restore the Missouri
Compromise, would have completely disorganized the political
opposition to the extension of slavery, for it would have stricken

POLITICAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY

down the only distinct ground for the independent existence of
the Republicans.

For Randall to think it "inevitable" that slavery would not have
gone into Kansas is to suppose that the same historical effect
would have followed if the historical cause had been different.
The existence of the Republican party was a sufficient cause for
the defeat of Lecompton and the turning back of the pro-slavery
tide in Kansas. 7 Whether there was present at the same time
any other cause sufficient to arrest the spread of slavery into
Kansas remains to be seen. The only other possibility alleged
then or since concerns the effect of soil, climate, and productions.
But even granting for the moment the tenability of the eco-
nomic thesis, according to which slavery would not have proved
profitable in Kansas, one can only conclude that the Southerners
who indubitably wished to try slavery in Kansas would in time
have abandoned it. There is no historical ground whatever for
asserting the inevitable freedom of Kansas in the immediate
future certainly none for asserting the freedom of Kansas as a
territory except on the assumption of the continuing existence
of such a party as the Republican, committed to the congressional
prohibition of slavery in the territory. And, again, even granting
credence to the economic argument, there is no reason to think
that the process of rooting slavery out of Kansas, if it had ever
got in, would not have been very long and difficult. Keeping
slavery out, as Lincoln said repeatedly, was a thousand times
easier than getting it out.

It is as certain as anything that can be asserted about the
Kansas struggle that, without the active vehicle of the Republican
party to support them, Beecher's bibles would have been an
arsenal of little worth in the contest with the Blue Lodges and
their border ruffians. Slaveowners did not, and would not, risk
their extremely valuable property in Kansas in the turbulent
conditions of that struggle. Randall notes with emphasis the ab-
sence of slaves from Kansas in 1858 and 1861 and concludes
that, because there were none there (to speak of), there would
not have been any. All his evidence proves, however, is that
under existing conditions owners did not take them. Owners
were awaiting the outcome of the struggle. It is simply naive to
suppose that the vast political effort the South made to establish
the right to hold slaves in the prairies was one that they never
expected to exercise. It made all the difference in the world

3<X) THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

whether the anti-slavery migrants to Kansas were men who merely
thought slavery unprofitable or men who thought slavery a pro-
found moral and political evil. Men of the former description
might, in a friendly way, urge slaveowners to return home and
dispose of their slaves and invest their money in something more
profitable. Or they might find that they were wrong and take
a try at slaveowning themselves. Men of the latter description
might steal their neighbors* slaves or otherwise attempt their
expropriation. It was the hostility to slavery which alone assured
such a hostile reception to slaveowners in Kansas, a reception
that decided most of them to remain in the shelter of ancestral
slave codes until the issue was decided for them in the halls of
Congress. Without the Republican party Kansas would not have
been populated with men so determinedly opposed to slavery,
and there is no way of knowing how many more slaveowners
would then have ventured into Kansas. But without the sustained
determination to restore the Missouri Compromise there would
have been no Republican party (i.e., no party of that description).
Popular sovereignty "worked" in Kansas in 1858 not because of
Douglas but because of the Republicans.

Professor Randall has written, "By 1858 it was evident that
slavery in Kansas had no chance. Indeed, the decisive step on
this matter was taken in the free-state sense on August 2, 1858,
before the joint debates began." 8 This assertion, however, is pure
conjecture. Only in retrospect can one say that the rejection of
Lecompton by the people of Kansas on that date was "decisive."
No one knew then that the whole weary business might not have
to be done over again. Thirteen thousand Kansans balloted on
that August day, rejecting Lecompton by a margin of six to one.
But in a country as large as Kansas how durable would a margin
of nine thousand votes prove, particularly if Congress should
withhold statehood for three, four, or five years? And what would
prevent another fraudulent minority from attempting the same
hoax over again, this time with success, if a President pliant to
the wishes of slaveholders should again use the patronage of
his administration to bend Congress to his will? There was, in
fact, no assurance known to any contemporary other than that
supplied by experience, which was, to repeat, the experience of
a vital Republican party. And to have gone to sleep on the
conviction that freedom in Kansas, or anywhere in the world,
was "inevitable" would have been to take the linchpin from the

POLITICAL TENDENCY TOWARD SLAVERY 30!

Republican party. The "decisive step" of August 2, 1858, meant a
crisis for the Republican party, for it meant the replacement of
a stern and immediate danger with a subtler and longer-term
danger. Nothing but the sustained sense of danger which Lincoln
succeeded in driving home to his own cohorts on the hot and
dusty prairies of that fateful summer preserved the party and
ultimately assured that the "decisive step" of August 2 would
be succeeded by other steps in the same direction. When Kansas
became a free state in 1861, under the operation of Douglas's
still unaltered Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, it was not because
of Douglas that it did so or the foolish Greeley, who had wanted
Lincoln to withdraw from the Senate race in favor of Douglas
but because of Lincoln.

Chapter XIII

The Intrinsic Evil of the Repeal of the
Missouri Compromise

LINCOLN, we have said, believed in the restoration of the Missouri
Compromise restriction on slavery as a supreme necessity of
national policy. This necessity did not lie, however, solely or even
mainly in the efficacy of the restriction as a barrier to slavery in
such places as Kansas. That Lincoln, in flat contradiction to
Douglasand to some present-day historians believed such a
barrier was needed is certain. It was needed because the moral
and legal opposition to slavery in free territory, and free states
as well, were inseparable. Professor Randall thinks that the free
states would not have tolerated a Supreme Court decision legal-
izing slavery within their borders because they were hostile to
slavery. Lincoln, of course, would have granted as much, but
Lincoln did not believe the free states could abandon their insist-
ence upon the freedom of the territories without losing the root
of the conviction which was the foundation of their own freedom.
For the free states to abandon the Missouri Compromise restric-
tion could only signal a drastic change in the moral attitude
toward slavery in the free states. Such a change, if it were allowed
to proceed unchecked, might very well lead in the not-too-distant
future to the peaceful acceptance of slavery there. We have yet
to examine the thesis that there was no danger of slavery spread-
ing to free territories or states because it would not have been
profitable. For the moment we summarize Lincoln's argument by
saying that Republican insistence on the maintenance of the legal
barrier in Kansas and Nebraska was indispensable for maintaining

BEFEAL OF MISSOURI COMPROMISE 303

the moral fiber of the political resistance to the spread of slavery,
whether in the territories or the free states.

We have thus far emphasized the practical importance to Lin-
coln of keeping alive the question of federal restriction of slavery
in Kansas and Nebraska. But we would fail completely to grasp
the dimensions of Lincoln's argument if we limited ourselves to
these considerations. "If Kansas should sink today, and leave a
great vacant space in the earth's surface," he said in the course
of the debates, "this vexed question would still be among us." 1 We
shall presently see that Lincoln regarded Kansas as no more than
representative of other territories which might fall prey to slavery
on the basis of the precedent of Douglas's Nebraska bill, if the
latter were allowed to stand as a model of territorial law. But
above and beyond territories, or states, there was a question of
intrinsic right and wrong which was at the heart of the contro-
versy. There was the question of whether, as a matter of principle,
slavery should be tolerated only by necessity where it already
existed and where the public mind might rest in the belief that
it was in course of ultimate extinction or whether it might grow,
spread, and become perpetual. This issue was raised by the re-
peal. It was an issue which, once raised, naturally took precedence
over all others. It so took precedence because it involved radically
different, alternative ways of conceiving the nature and function
of the whole American polity. It was impossible to raise the
question which was raised, concerning the status of the humanity
of the Negro, without at the same time raising an equally vital
question concerning the status of the humanity of white men.
It was impossible to deny the Negro the natural rights demanded
for all men by the Declaration of Independence without denying
the natural foundation of the rights of white men. And it was
impossible to change radically the way of conceiving of the white
man's rights without changing radically the white man's life. Even
if the legal foundation of American rights had remained the same
which Lincoln believed impossible the changed conception of
their extra-legal foundation in "the laws of Nature and of Nature's
God" would have been catastrophic to him. It would have been
a change in the inner consciousness of the American citizen
which would have sapped his moral dignity and have deprived
him of inner worth, whether any external consequences were to
ensue or not

304 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

According to Professor Randall, the debates were without
"significance" because the debaters did not "enter upon the
practical and substantial results of their contrary opinions." Ran-
dall implies that opinions are not politically significant except as
they determine "practical and substantial results." Professor
Randall may be correct, but his opinion is not Lincoln's. Or per-
haps we should say that everything turns upon what is taken
to be "practical and substantial." For Lincoln there was nothing
more substantially important than whether Americans lived their
lives believing that all men are created equal or whether they
did not. For Lincoln the material prosperity of America was
chiefly valuable as the external sign of inner spiritual health. And
that healththe qualitative superiority of American life was in-
extricably and inexorably linked to the tenets of the Declaration
of Independence.

There is a view widespread today that the principle of a free
society is, in itself, neutral with respect to the differences of
opinion which may divide the citizens. According to this view,
the processes of constitutional democracy exist for the purpose
of allowing differing opinions to compete with each other, and
public policy may stand upon the ground of any opinions, so long
as these command the support of a constitutional majority. One
cannot understand Lincoln's policy in the long course of his de-
bates with Douglas from 1854 until 1860 without realizing that
it constitutes a categorical denial of this view. Douglas's doctrine
of popular sovereignty, unclear as it was on many points, was
nonetheless clear in this: that it conceived of a virtually unre-
strained right of local majorities to determine the rights of
minorities and to determine these minority rights according to
the interests of the majority. It involved a flat repudiation of
the principle laid down in Jefferson's first inaugural address, "that
though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will,
to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their
equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which
would be oppression." This Douglas's doctrine did directly, in
making the rights of Negroes solely a matter for determination
by positive law, but indirectly it had the same effect upon the
rights of white men. It was Lincoln's insistence that this was
the character of Douglas's doctrine, and that such a doctrine was
both untrue and immoral, which constituted his central conten-

REPEAL OF MISSOURI COMPROMISE 305

tion, both theoretical and practical, in his long exchanges with
Douglas.

In Lincoln's Peoria speech of 1854 ^ e ^d declared that he
hated the principle of Douglas's Nebraska bill, a principle which
acknowledged a right to have slavery wherever men find it in
their interest to have it. He hated it because of the injustice of
slavery, because it enabled "the enemies of free institutions, with
plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites . . . and especially because
it forced so many really good men amongst ourselves into an
open war with the very fundamental principles of civil-liberty
criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that
there is no right principle of action but self-interest." It is not, of
course, for a free government to legislate true opinion with regard
to the fundamental principles of civil liberty. But it is certainly
the task of statesmanship to create conviction in the minds and
hearts of the citizens with respect to these principles. And that
man is no friend of free government who flatters the people into
believing that whatever they wish to have is right and that he
will abide by their demands, whatever they are.

At the end of this same Peoria speech Lincoln rebuts a series
of arguments that Douglas had advanced against him after he
had given the same speech somewhat earlier at Springfield.
Among his remarks are the following:

In the course of my main argument, Judge Douglas inter-
rupted me to say, that the principle of the Nebraska bill
was very old; that it originated when God made man and
placed good and evil before him, allowing him to choose
for himself, being responsible for the choice he should make.
At the time I thought this was merely playful; and I an-
swered it accordingly. But in his reply to me he renewed
it, as a serious argument In seriousness then, the facts of
this proposition are not true as stated. God did not place
good and evil before man, telling him to make his choice.
On the contrary, he did tell him there was one tree, of the
fruit of which, he should not eat, upon pain of certain
death. I should scarcely wish so strong a prohibition against
slavery in Nebraska. 2

The condition of man under a free government, according to
Lincoln, resembled that of man in the Garden of Eden. His
freedom was conditional conditional upon denying to himself a

306 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

forbidden fruit. That fruit was the alluring pleasure of despotism.
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a mister. This
expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to
the extent of the difference, is not democracy," 8 Lincoln wrote
on the eve of the joint debates. A democratic people must abide
by certain restraints in order to be a democratic people. The
moment they cast these off they cease to be democratic, whether
a change takes place in the outward forms of their political life
or not. Lincoln said he would not be either slave or master. But
what was true of Lincoln's will was a reflection of the conviction
in Lincoln's mind that "all men are created equal." People could
not be expected long to abstain from the forbidden fruit who did
not believe that this abstention was in accordance with a higher
principle than their own pleasure. If the pleasures of freedom
come into competition with the pleasures of despotism, they can-
not survive on the basis of their pleasantness alone. That, we have
seen, was Jefferson's and Lincoln's explicit judgment and it
would be a rash man who would deny that they were correct.
Lincoln's analysis of the problem of popular government in the
Lyceum speech had long convinced him that if the choice of free
government rested only on the appeal of such government to the
passions i.e., to the pleasure of the people it would not long
endure. The Lyceum speech demonstrated how the highest
ambition of the loftiest souls, hitherto believed capable of gratifi-
cation only in a monarchic order, might be achieved in the
perpetuation of a democratic one. It recorded the discovery in
the soul of "towering genius" that the highest ambition can be
conceived as consummated only in the highest service, that
egotism and altruism ultimately coincide in that consciousness of
superiority which is superiority in the ability to benefit others.
But what is true of the superior individual is also true of the
superior nation; and Lincoln argues in the course of his debates
with Douglas that the freedom of a free people resides above
all in that consciousness of freedom which is also a consciousness
of self-imposed restraints. The heart of Lincoln's case for popular
government is the vindication of the people's cause on the highest
grounds which had hitherto been claimed for aristocratic forms.
In the consciousness of a strength which is not abused is a con-
sciousness of a greater strength, and therewith a greater pride
and a greater pleasure, than can be known by those who do not
know how to deny themselves.

REPEAL OF MISSOURI COMPROMISE 307

A free popular government, founded upon the doctrine of uni-
versal human rights, would not guarantee that for every individ-
ual the rewards of life would always be proportionate to his
efforts. But it would be the first in which there would be no
guarantee that for all but a privileged minority the rewards could
in no event be proportionate to their efforts. It would be the first in
which there would be no pre-ordained barriers to distributive
justice. To those who argued that the Negro was an inferior being,
endowed by nature with lesser gifts of intellect and moral capac-
ity, Lincoln replied that, if the Negro had been given less, that
was no reason to take from him the little he had. If he has been
given little, that little let him enjoy. Lincoln's understanding of
"equality" is then nothing but distributive justice or proportional
equality. Every man has the right to labor productively, and he
has the right to the fruit of his labor. That one man can labor
more productively than another no more entitles him to the lesser
man's little than the lesser man is entitled to the greater one's
much. Every attempt to deny the Negro equality of right, as
distinct from equality of reward, Lincoln called that "old serpent,"
the root of all despotism, "You work; 111 eat."

The price of American freedom, of all civil liberty, was fidelity
to the faith that "all men are created equal." Constancy to this
was as necessary to the preservation of the paradise of American
freedom as the obedience of Adam and Eve to God's single pro-
hibition had been necessary to that other Eden. Both gardens,
alas, had their temptations. The existence of Negro slavery and
the discovery of vast profits to be made from it led Americans
to believe that all men are not created equal, after all, but that
some are born to serve and some to be served. But let this conclu-
sion enter, and force and fraud will, in fact, determine who shall
serve and who shall be served. The mere existence of slavery,
according to Lincoln, was not a fatal transgression, for the
American people were not responsible for its introduction- The
spirit of the Revolution had placed the institution far along the
road toward ultimate extinction; but the spirit of the Revolution
had passed, and a new Tight* had dawned. In consenting to the
extension of slavery the American people had succumbed to
serpentine temptation. And now Lincoln, no less than Moses or
the prophets, insisted that a time had come when the question
had to be answered by every man, "Who is on the Lord's side?"

Chapter XIV

The Universal Meaning of the
Declaration of Independence

THE long political duel between Stephen A. Douglas and Abra-
ham Lincoln was above all a struggle to determine the nature of
the opinion which should form the doctrinal foundation of Ameri-
can government. No political contest in history was more exclu-
sively or passionately concerned with the character of the beliefs
in which the souls of men were to abide. Neither the differences
which divided Moslem and Christian at the time of the Crusades,
nor the differences which divided Protestant and Catholic in
sixteenth-century Europe, nor those which arrayed the crowned
heads of Europe against the regicides of revolutionary France
were believed by the warring advocates to be more important to
their salvation, individually and collectively. Vast practical conse-
quences flowed from the differences in all cases, but we could
not understand the meaning of the differences if we did not first
see them as the men who fought for them saw them, as having
absolute intrinsic importance, apart from all external conse-
quences.

"Swinging up and down and back and forth across Illinois, mak-
ing the welkin ring and setting the prairies on fire, Lincoln and
Douglas debated what? That is the surprising thing," says Pro-
fessor Randall.

With all the problems that might have been put before
the people as proper matter for their consideration in choos-
ing a senator choice of government servants, immigration,
the tariff, international policy, promotion of education, west-

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 309

ward extension of railroads, the opening of new lands for
homesteads, protection against greedy exploitation of those
lands . . . encouragement to settlers . . . improving the
condition of factory workers, and alleviating those agrarian
grievances that were to plague the coming decades with
such issues facing the country, those two candidates for the
Senate talked as if there were only one issue. 1

According to Randall, Lincoln and Douglas ignored any such
"representative coverage of the problems of mid-century America"
while confining themselves almost exclusively to the question of
slavery in the territories. But while slavery in the territories was
the single practical issue, it was in large measure subordinated in
the course of the debates. For Lincoln there was, indeed, "only
one issue," but that issue was whether or not the American people
should believe that "all men are created equal" in the full extent
and true significance of that proposition. Lincoln did not believe
that in concentrating upon this sole and single question he was
in any sense narrowing and limiting the range of the discussion.
"Our government," Lincoln said before the Dred Scott decision,
"rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can
change the government, practically just so much." But public opin-
ion, according to Lincoln, was not essentially or primarily opinion
on a long list of individual topics, such as Professor Randall has
enumerated, nor was it the kind of thing that the Gallup poll
attempts to measure. "Public opinion, on any subject," said Lin-
coln, "always has a 'central idea' from which all its minor thoughts
radiate." And the "'central idea* in our political public opinion,
at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be 'the
equality of men/" 2 For Lincoln, then, to debate public-lands
policy, or the condition of factory workers, when the question of
the equality of rights of all the people was in dispute would have
been utterly inconsequential. Whether the land would be tilled
by freeholders or slaves, and whether factory workers might be
permitted to strike, would be vitally affected by a decision
concerning that "central idea." Until the matter of that central
idea was settled, all peripheral questions were required, by the
logic of the situation, to be held in abeyance.

In the first joint debate, at Ottawa, Lincoln affirmed in the
strongest language the importance of the contest between himself
and Douglas, for capturing the public mind. "In this and like com-
munities," said Lincoln, "public sentiment is everything. With

31O THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can suc-
ceed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper
than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes
statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed. This
must be borne in mind, as also the additional fact that Judge
Douglas is a man of vast influence, so great that it is enough for
many men to profess to believe anything, when they once find
out Judge Douglas professes to believe it." 3 These expressions,
with minor variations, were repeated over and over. The decision
in the Dred Scott case, as we have already noted, Lincoln did
not believe would have been "possible . . . to be executed," had
it not been for the fact that since 1854 Douglas had been inculcat-
ing in the public mind new "general maxims about liberty," as
Lincoln put it at Galesburg, maxims such as Douglas's "assertions
that he 'don't care whether slavery is voted up or voted down;'
and that 'whoever wants slavery has a right to have it;' that 'upon
principles of equality it should be allowed to go everywhere;' that
'there is no inconsistency between free and slave institutions/" 4

The Kansas-Nebraska Act had said that men might have slavery
in the territories if they wished to have it, and the Dred Scott
decision had decided that they might not forbid it if they wished
to do so, because the Constitution of the United States affirmed
the right of property in slaves and forbade either Congress or a
territorial legislature to interfere with that right. The common
premise of both the act and the decision was, in the words of the
Chief Justice, that the Negro was an "ordinary article of merchan-
dise and traffic," that he "might justly and lawfully be reduced
to slavery," and that he was a being "so far inferior that [he] had
no rights which the white man was bound to respect." This meant
that the proposition that "all men are created equal," upon which
the government of the United States was admittedly founded,
either could not be understood in its universalistic implications
or that the Negro could not be admitted to be a man. Lincoln
controverted the Taney-Douglas premise upon the grounds that it
was false historically, absurd logically, and immoral politically.

That the Negro was not a man was something that neither
Douglas nor Taney would say in so many words; nor was it some-
thing that either affirmed to be the opinion of the Fathers. Yet
Lincoln insisted that it was an inescapable implication of their
denial of the Negro's natural right to freedom. This he demon-

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

strated in the Peoria speech of 1854 when ^ e sai( ^ The law which
forbids the bringing of slaves from Africa; and that which has so
long forbid taking them to Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished
on any moral principle."

Equal justice to the South, it is said, requires us to consent
to the extending of slavery to new countries. That is to say,
inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to
Nebraska, therefore I must not object to you taking your
slave. Now, I admit this is perfectly logical, if there is no
difference between hogs and negroes. But while you thus re-
quire me to deny the humanity of the negro, I wish to ask
whether you of the south yourselves, have ever been willing
to do as much? It is kindly provided that of all those who
come into the world, only a small percentage are natural
tyrants. That percentage is no larger in the slave states than
in the free. The great majority, south as well as north, have
human sympathies, of which they can no more divest them-
selves than they can of their sensibility to physical pain.
These sympathies in the bosoms of the southern people,
manifest in many ways, their sense of the wrong of slavery,
and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in
the negro. If they deny this, let me address them a few plain
questions. In 1820 you joined the north, almost unanimously,
in declaring the African slave trade piracy, and in annexing
to it the punishment of death. Why did you do this? If you did
not feel that it was wrong, why did you join in providing that
men should be hung for it? The practice was no more than
bringing wild negroes from Africa, to sell to such as would
buy them. But you never thought of hanging men for catching
and selling wild horses, wild buffaloes or wild bears. 5

Lincoln ever maintained that, as there was nothing in logic or
morals, neither would there long be anything in politics to forbid
the reopening of the slave trade if the legitimacy of the extension
of slavery were once accepted by public opinion. If Negroes
were nothing but an article of commerce, as Taney contended,
then it was certainly an arbitrary infringement on the right of
property to compel men to pay upward of fifteen hundred dollars
for field hands, when they might be bought upon the coast of
Africa for the price of a red pocket handkerchief. But, in fact, it
had never been generally believed by Americans that it was just

312 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

and lawful to reduce Negroes to servitude, as the capital punish-
ment for the slave trade indicated. Moreover, Lincoln continued,
the man who engaged in the domestic slave trade, the slave
dealer, was generally despised and held in contempt even in the
South.

If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through
the job without so much as touching him. It is common with
you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave
dealer you avoid the ceremony instinctively shrinking from
the snaky contact . . . Now why is this? You do not so treat
the man who deals in corn, cattle or tobacco.

Again, continued Lincoln, there are nearly a half million free
blacks, worth over two hundred millions of dollars, at the average
price (in 1854) f ^ ve hundred dollars.

How comes this vast amount of property to be running
about without owners? We do not see free horses or free cat-
tle running at large. How is this? All these free blacks are the
descendants of slaves, or have been slaves themselves, and
they would be slaves now, but for something which has
operated on their white owners, inducing them, at vast pe-
cuniary sacrifices, to liberate them. What is this something?
Is there any mistaking it? In all these cases it is your sense
of justice, and human sympathy, continually telling you, that
the poor negro has some natural right to himself that those
who deny it, and make mere merchandise of him, deserve
kicking, contempt and death.

Douglas's Nebraska bill, later joined by the Dred Scott decision,
instituted a "tendency to dehumanize" the Negro, although the
moral sense of the American people, South as well as North,
testified to the Negro's humanity, to the moral baseness of treating
him as "mere merchandise." Before the contest between Lincoln
and Douglas was finally over, Douglas said in a speech at
Memphis, as reported by Lincoln in his 1859 Cincinnati speech:

. . . that while in all contests between the negro and white
man he was for the white man . . . that in all questions be-
tween the negro and the crocodile he was for the negro. 6

This declaration was not made accidentally, said Lincoln; Douglas
had said the same thing many times during the 1858 campaign,

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 310

although it had not been reported in his speeches then. It
indicated an equation, according to Lincoln: as the crocodile is
to the Negro, so is the Negro to the white man. Thus it was a
calculated attempt to reduce the Negro, from the white man's
standpoint, to the level of the brute. "As the negro ought to treat
the crocodile as a beast, so the white man ought to treat the
negro as a beast."

The attempt to legitimize the extension of slavery was impossi-
ble without denying the Negro's humanity or without denying the
moral right of humanity or both. Taney, in the Dred Scott
decision, had attempted to escape the moral responsibility for such
implications by ascribing to the Founding Fathers opinions which
he (unlike Douglas) could not bring even himself to espouse.
Then he found in the principle of constitutional responsibility a
justification for enforcing these opinions.

No one, we presume, supposes that any change in public
opinion, or feeling in relation to this unfortunate race . . .
should induce the Court to give to the words of the Constitu-
tion a more liberal construction in their favor than they were
intended to bear when the instrument was framed and
adopted . . . Any other rule of construction would abrogate
the judicial character of this court, and make it the mere
reflex of the popular opinion or passion of the day.

Lincoln agreed wholeheartedly with the foregoing conception of
the function of the Supreme Court But he maintained that Taney
was doing exactly what he denied doing; namely, adopting an
opinion which had never even been dreamed of until the neces-
sities of the Democratic party, as indicated by the results of the
November 1856 elections, had engendered it. In the course of the
joint debates Lincoln finally gave it as his belief that Taney was
the first man, and Douglas the second, who had ever denied that
the Negro was included in the Declaration. The "fixed and
universal'' opinion from 1776 until 1857 was, in short, almost the
exact opposite of what the Democratic party, echoing Douglas
and Taney, now professed and now said that the Fathers had
professed.

At Galesburg, the other day [Lincoln said at Alton], I
said, in answer to Judge Douglas, that three years ago there
never had been a man, so far as I knew or believed, in the

314 THE C^E FOR

whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independ-
ence did not include negroes in the term "aU men", I reassert
it today. I assert that Judge Douglas and all his friends may
search 'the whole records of the country, and it will be a
great matter of astonishment to me if they shall be able to
find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered
the astounding sentiment that the term "all men" in the
Declaration did not include the negro. Do not let me be mis-
understood. I know that more than three years ago there were
men who, finding this assertion constantly in the way of their
schemes to bring about the ascendancy and perpetuation of
slavery, denied the truth of it. I know that Mr. Calhoun and
all the politicians of his school denied the truth of the
Declaration. I know that it ran along in the mouth of some
Southern men for a period of years, ending at last in that
shameful, though rather forcible, declaration of Petit of
Indiana, upon the floor of the United States Senate, that the
Declaration of Independence was in that respect a "self-
evident lie,** rather than a self-evident truth. But I say . . .
that three years ago there never had lived a man who had
ventured to assail it in the sneaking way of pretending to
believe it, and then asserting it did not include the negro.
I believe the first man who ever said it was Chief Justice
Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our
friend Stephen A. Douglas. And now it has become the
catchword of the entire party. 7

While we would not attest, as a matter of historical record, that
no man had ever said what Douglas and Taney were saying, prior
to 1857, Lincoln's statement cannot be much of an exaggeration,
if it is an exaggeration at all. That Washington, Jefferson, Adams,
Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Patrick Henry, and all others of
their general philosophic persuasion understood the Declaration
in its universalistic sense, and as including the Negro, is beyond
doubt or cavil. All of them read the Declaration as an expression
of the sentiments of Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government,
wherein many of them had read, almost from childhood, that all
men are naturally in "a state of perfect freedom to order their
actions . . . without asking leave, or depending upon the will of
any other man. A state also of equality, wherein all power and
jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there

DEGLABAHON OF INDEPENDENCE 3 1 S

being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same
species and rank . . . should also be equal one amongst another
without subordination or subjection .* The Declaration of
Independence had said that governments are instituted "to secure
these rights/' which plainly implied that the security, or enjoy-
ment, of the rights which are all men's by nature does not follow
from the fact of their unaHenability. The Revolution was a great
stroke to better secure the unalienable rights of some men, but,
still more, it was a promise that all men everywhere might some
day not merely possess but enjoy their natural rights. This promise
was to be fulfilled in and through the successful example of a
government dedicated to the security of the natural rights of the
men who organized that government, the first government in the
history of the world so dedicated. If that government had at-
tempted to secure in their fullness the natural rights of all Ameri-
cans, not to mention all men everywhere, the experiment of such
a government would have met disaster before it had been fairly
attempted. But the inability of the Founders then and there to
secure the rights of all the men whom they believed possessed
unalienable rights did not in the least mean that they believed
that the only people possessed of such rights were those whose
rights were to be immediately secured.

"Chief Justice Taney," said Lincoln in his Springfield speech
on the Dred Scott decision (June 26, 1857), "admits that the lan-
guage of the Declaration is broad enough to include the whole
human family,

but he and Judge Douglas argue that the authors of that
instrument did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that
they did not at once, actually place them on the equality
with the whites. Now this grave argument comes to just
nothing at all, by the other fact, that they did not at once,
or ever afterwards, actually place all white people on an
equality with one another. And this is the staple argument
of both the Chief Justice and the Senator, for doing this
obvious violence to the plain, unmistakable language of the
Declaration. I think the authors of that notable instrument
intended to include all men, but they did not intend to de-
clare all men equal in oSL respects, They did not mean to
say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments,
or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness,

3*6 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

in what respects they did consider all men created equal-
equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This they said, and
this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious un-
truth, that all men were enjoying that equality, nor yet, that
they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact,
they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply
to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow
as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set
up a standard maxim for a free society, which should be
familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to,
constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly
attained, constantly approximated, and therefore constantly
spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the
happiness and value of life to all people of all colors every-
where. 8

We are familiar with Lincoln's conviction of the necessity of
a "political religion" for the perpetuation of our political institu-
tions and his tendency, fully matured in the Lyceum speech, but
finally consummated in the Second Inaugural, to transform the
American story into the moral elements of the Biblical story. We
cannot help then perceiving the resemblance, in such expressions
as "a standard maxim," "familiar to all," "revered by all," and
"constantly looked to," to the words of the greatest of all lawgivers:

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be
in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto
thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in
thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when
thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

Nor did Lincoln forget the concept of political salvation when,
in the course of the campaign of 1858, he said (July 10, 1858):

It is said in one of the admonitions of the Lord, "As your
Father in Heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect." The Savior,
I suppose, did not expect that any human creature could
be as perfect as the Father in Heaven; but he said, "As your
Father in Heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect." He set that
up as a standard, and he who did most towards reaching that
standard, attained the highest degree of moral perfection. So
I say in relation to the principle that all men are created

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 317

equal, let it be as nearly reached as we can. If we cannot
give freedom to every creature, let us do nothing that will
impose slavery upon any other creature. 9

At this point we must obtrude some critical reflections concern-
ing the adequacy of Lincoln's assertions with regard to the mean-
ing of the signers of the Declaration. If we ask, first of all, if
Lincoln's vindication of the consistency of the Fathers was alto-
gether accurate from an historical standpoint, the answer, we be-
lieve, cannot be an unequivocal affirmative. It is true that
Lincoln's hypothesis as to the meaning of the Declaration is
consistent with the language of that document and is at least
superficially consistent with its known philosophic antecedent,
whereas the interpretation of Douglas and Taney certainly does
the "obvious violence" that Lincoln asserts that it does. We may
even supplement Lincoln's indictment by pointing out that Doug-
las's interpretation transforms the Declaration from a document
of natural law to one of positive law. Douglas, in his speech on
the Dred Scott decision, had said, as Lincoln quoted him, that
when the signers

declared all men to have been created equal . . . they were
speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to
British subjects born and residing in Great Britain that they
were entitled to the same inalienable rights . . . The Declara-
tion was adopted for the purpose of justifying the colonists
in the eyes of the civilized world in withdrawing their
allegiance from the British crown, and dissolving their con-
nection with the mother country. 10

The last sentence is correct enough as stating one purpose of the
Declaration. But precisely because the revolutionists appealed to
the whole civilized world, to men who were under no obligation
to the laws of Great Britain, they did not affirm their rights as
Britons but their rights as men, and they appealed not to the
laws of Britain for justification but to laws common to themselves
and all those to whom they addressed themselves, to the "laws
of Nature and of Nature's God." The only logical reconciliation
of Douglas's statement with the language of the Declaration
would be by means of the proposition that all true men are by
nature Britishl Such a proposition might find its place in some
undiscovered operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan, but we cannot

318 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

imagine the Founding Fathers in the chorus! Still further, the
very concept of the unalienability of certain rights is incon-
sistent with the idea of their being rights of British subjects.
The rights of Britons as Britons were rights conferred by British
law and hence alienable by the same process which conferred
them. The King in Parliament might add to them or subtract
from them; but the rights referred to by the Declaration
are conceived as properties of man in virtue of his nature and
hence unalterable by any mortal power. Douglas and Taney were
indeed shamefully ignorant of the distinction between natural law
and positive human law, and the obviousness of the violence they
did to Jefferson's language cannot be affirmed too strongly.

Yet despite the consistency of Lincoln's alternative rendering of
the signers' and Founders' meaning, it cannot be endorsed on his-
torical grounds without some qualification. For in the passages
just quoted Lincoln treats the proposition that "all men are
created equal" as a transcendental goal and not as the immanent
and effective basis of actual political right. And, in so doing, he
transforms and transcends the original meaning of that proposi-
tion, although he does not destroy it. His, we might say, is a
creative interpretation, a subtle preparation for the "new birth of
freedom." Let us try to understand it more precisely.

The idea of the equality of all men, within the eighteenth-
century horizon, was connected with the idea of the state of na-
ture, a pre-political state in which there was no government, no
lawful subordination of one man to another man. It was a state
which was tolerable but only barely so. Because it was but barely
tolerable, "mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are
sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to
which they are accustomed." But because it was tolerable, it was
preferable to "absolute Despotism," which was intolerable. The
concept of the state of nature, as a pre-political state, highly
undesirable, yet tolerable, is among the axiomatic premises of the
doctrine of the Declaration of Independence. To indicate the de-
parture that Lincoln's interpretation represents we observe that
the idea of such a pre-political state plays no significant role in
his thinking. The only use Lincoln ever made of the expression
"state of nature" is when he quoted or paraphrased a passage
from Clay's famous Mendenhall speech. The following is the
passage, used by Lincoln in his reply to Douglas at Alton:

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 319

I desire no concealment of my opinions in regard to the
institution of slavery. I look upon it as a great evil and deeply
lament that we have derived it from the parental govern-
ment, and from our ancestors. I wish every slave in the
United States was in the country of his ancestors. But here
they are; the question is how they can best be dealt with?
If a state of nature existed and we were about to lay the
foundation of society, no man would be more strongly op-
posed than I should be to incorporate the institution of slav-
ery among its elements. 11

Lincoln likened Kansas and Nebraska to the state of nature, where
the political foundations of society were about to be laid. This
usage, however, is widely different from the idea of the state of
nature presupposed in the Declaration. Lincoln and Clay presup-
pose a more or less virgin country and conditions which are more
or less optimum. They envisage the kind of act of foundation
portrayed in the dramatic dialogue of Plato's Republic, in which
reason chooses the "elements" it would incorporate in a "good"
society. The Lockean state of nature, on the other hand, although
a normative concept, is normative primarily in a negative way:
it specifies the conditions under which the right of revolution
ought to be exercised, and it specifies the purposes for which it
ought to be exercised. But because the conditions under which
the right ought to be exercised are very bad conditions (although
not the worst possible), the purposes for which the right of
revolution ought to be exercised are minimal rather than maxi-
mal conditions of human welfare. It is true that these minimal
conditions, when stated in terms of the political circumstances of
the thirteen colonies in 1776, do not appear to us today as so
dreadfully undesirable. What the signers termed absolute despot-
ismforgetting, for the moment, the powerful but overdrawn
portrait of the Declaration would have appeared as a paradise
of freedom to the oppressed humanity of the ages. Yet the fact
remains that within the range of their experience, and from the
point of view of their concept of the state of nature, they were
asserting minimal rights, and they claimed they were absolved
of their allegiance in the eyes of civilized mankind because of
the insecurity which they had come to feel at the hands of the
government of Great Britain. On the other hand, Lincoln's inter-
pretation of "all men are created equal" is not that it specifies

320 THE CASE FOB LINCOLN

the condition of man in a pre-political state, a highly undesirable
state which marks the point at which men ought to revolt, but
that it specifies the optimum condition which the human mind
can envisage. It is a condition toward which men have a duty
ever to strive, not a condition from which they have a right to
escape. It is conceived as a political, not a pre-political, condition,
a condition in whichto the extent that it is realized equality of
right is secured to every man not by the natural law (which
governs Locke's state of nature, in which all men are equal) but
by positive human law. Lincoln's interpretation of human equal-
ity, as we have already indicated, is that every man had an equal
right to be treated justly, that just treatment is a matter of in-
trinsic worth, that a man's rewards from society ought to be
proportioned to the value of his work and not to any subjective
liking or disliking.
In his Springfield speech of July 17, 1858, Lincoln said:

Certainly the negro is not our equal in color perhaps not
in many other respects; still, in the right to put into his
mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the
equal of every other man, white or black. In pointing out that
more has been given you, you can not be justified in taking
away the little which has been given him. All I ask for the
negro is that if you do not like him, let him alone. If God
gave him but little, that little let him enjoy. 12

Or, as he wrote in a fragment which has survived:

Suppose it is true, that the negro is inferior to the white,
in the gifts of nature; is it not the exact reverse justice that
the white should, for that reason, take from the negro, any
part of the little that has been given him? "Give to him
that is needy" is the Christian rule of charity; but "Take from
him that is needy" is the rule of slavery. 18

According to Lincoln, as we have said, a man's rewards should
be proportioned to his labor, and this is (or should be) a function
of his moral and intellectual capacity. Lincoln did not, of course,
involve himself in any foolish controversy as to whether the Negro
did or did not have the same capacity as the white man; he
confined himself to asserting that his claims, whatever they were >
ought to be determined on the same principle as the white man's.

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 321

This followed from the proposition that all men have an equal
claim to just treatment and that the Negro was a man.

To sum up: in the old, predominantly Lockean interpretation
of the Declaration civil society is constituted by a movement away
from the state of nature, away from the condition in which
the equality of all men is actual. But in Lincoln's subtle rein-
terpretation civil society (i.e., just civil society) is constituted by
the movement toward a condition in which the equality of men
is actual. In the older view, which Lincoln shared as far as it
went, the actual recognition of the equality of all men is really a
necessary condition of the legitimacy of the claims of the govern-
ment upon the governed. But it is also a sufficient condition. For
the language of the Declaration at least permits the view that,
if the government of King George III had not been as thoroughly
despotic as it is pretended it actually was, the Revolution might
not have been justified. In short, the Declaration conceives of just
government mainly in terms of the relief from oppression. Lincoln
conceives of just government far more in terms of the requirement
to achieve justice in the positive sense; indeed, according to Lin-
coln, the proposition "all men are created equal" is so lofty a de-
mand that the striving for justice must be an ever-present
requirement of the human and political condition. While Lincoln
most assuredly accepted the Declaration in its minimal, revolu-
tionary meaning, he gave it a new dimension when he insisted
that it provided a test not merely of legitimate government i.e.,
of government that may command our allegiance because it is not
despotic but of good and just government i.e., of a government
which may be loved and revered because it augments "the
happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere."

Lincoln's interpretation of "all men are created equal" trans-
forms that proposition from a pre-political, negative, minimal, and
merely revolutionary norm, a norm which prescribes what civil
society ought not to be, into a transcendental affirmation of what
it ought to be. Lincoln does not, of course, abandon the lower-
level Lockean- Jeffersonian demands, yet there is visible a tension
between them and the higher ones upon which he insists.

The assertion that "all men are created equal" [he says in
the Dred Scott speech] was of no practical use in effecting
our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the

THE CASE FOR UNCOLN

Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant
it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling
block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free
people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew
the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant
when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence
their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard
nut to crack. 14

Lincoln was trying to perpetuate a government, Jefferson in 1776
to overthrow one, and Lincoln clearly has exaggerated Jefferson's
non-revolutionary purpose. In fact, the equality proposition was
indispensable to Jefferson in building his case for the right of revo-
lution upon Lockean ground, but the state-of-nature idea with
which it was bound up was alien to Lincoln's whole way of think-
ing. However, Lincoln was probably right when he said that
Jefferson did intend to make a statement which would have future
as well as present usefulness, although he may have overstated
the degree to which such a thought predominated in Jefferson's
consciousness. Yet there is a difference between the use which
Jefferson might have intended and the one Lincoln ascribes to
him. Jefferson was always more concerned to remind the people
of their rights than of their duties. He emphasized what they
should demand of their government rather than what they must
demand of themselves. Jefferson feared above all the usurpations
which governments might commit if the people became drowsy
and did not exercise that eternal vigilance which is the price of
freedom. He thought in terms of a perpetual struggle between
the governors and the governed, as epitomized in his famous
epigrammatic assertions, as, "the tree of liberty must be refreshed
from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," and
"that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as
necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." The
moral horizon of such expressions is markedly different from that
of Lincoln's Lyceum speech, with its round condemnation of
lawlessness and its conviction that any lawlessness, in such a
government as Jefferson himself had helped to found, was an in-
vitation to mob rule and mob rule the prelude to the failure of
the entire experiment in popular government. While Lincoln
never denied the danger of usurpations by the government, he
placed far more emphasis on the danger of usurpations of a

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 323

lawless people, which might become the usurpations of the
government in response to popular pressure. Once the govern-
ment was established upon a popular basis, the great danger, as
Lincoln saw it, was the corruption of the people. Jefferson tended
to see the people as sometimes careless of their own rights but
as primarily motivated only by the desire not to be oppressed.
Lincoln saw in the people, too, the desire to oppress. The
Caesarian danger arose because of the coincidence of Caesar's am-
bitions with the people's desire to oppress; one without the other
was powerless.

Jefferson, however, was not wholly unconcerned with the
possibilities of popular corruption, as shown by his fear of a
propertyless, urban proletariat and his advocacy of agrarianism
as a preservative of virtue. Yet Jefferson's position was in this
respect in hopeless contradiction with itself, in his simultaneous
advocacy of science and an education which was predominantly
scientific. For the consequence of science, particularly the em-
phatically practical science of Jefferson (like that of Franklin),
was inevitably such an increase in the productive powers of labor
as would necessitate an ever-growing division of labor, ever more
commerce, ever improved communications, and the ever-grow-
ing urbanization and industrialization of America. Jefferson's
agrarianism was a sheer anachronism from its beginning, a vestig-
ial attachment to a world he did as much to destroy as any man.
It was a reliance upon external conditions which could not
possibly long endure to produce a virtue which he was at least
occasionally aware was indispensable to preserve the institutions
he so valued. Jefferson's agrarianism, however, was an ad hoc
remedy for a defect in his theory, a defect of which he was in a
confused way conscious, but which he could never overcome. For
Jefferson's attempt to conceive of a remedy for die people's
corruption was vitiated by his Lockean horizon. 15 All obli-
gation within this horizon is conceived in terms of deductions
from the state of nature, the state in which all men are actually
equal. In this state, however, in which men have equal and un-
alienable rights, they have no real duties. The embryonic duties
which exist in Locke's state of nature are not genuine duties but
only rules which tell us to avoid doing those things which might
impel others to injure us. Duties in any meaningful sense arise
only in civil society and are conceived as logically required if

324 TOE CASE FOR

civil society is to perform well its function of securing our rights.
But whether in the state of nature or the state of civil society,
men are not instructed, on Lockean grounds, to abstain from
injuring others because it is objectively wrong, but because it is
foolish: it undermines the security for their own rights. In short,
there is little beyond an appeal to enlightened self-interest in the
doctrine of universal equality when conceived in its pristine,
Lockean form. Whereas for Lincoln, egotism and altruism ulti-
mately coincide, inasmuch the greatest self-satisfaction is con-
ceived as service to others; in the ethics just sketched such altruism
as there is is ultimately reduced to egotism. That the patriotism
engendered by the struggle for independence gave such an ethics
a greater dignity than this suggests cannot be gainsaid, any more
than the dignity of the character of Washington or the idealism
of Jefferson can be vindicated on such low grounds. Yet it is also
true that the widespread lack of concern over the moral challenge
of Negro slavery to the doctrine of universal rights in the Declara-
tion in the Revolutionary generation can be traced to the
egotistic quality of these rights in their Lockean formulation. For
this reason we must concede that Lincoln exaggerated the degree
in which the men of the Revolution were concerned with the
freedom of all men. And thus there is some color, although it
is only the faintest, for Douglas's assertion that the signers would
have been inconsistent if they had meant to include the Negroes
in "all men" and then had continued to hold slaves themselves.
In truth, their principle included the Negroes in "all men," but
the Negroes' rights did not impose corresponding duties upon the
white masters. Lincoln, we believe, gave a greater consistency
and dignity to the position of the signers than was theirs originally.
Let us try to understand precisely how he did so.

All men admittedly have a right to liberty by the doctrine of
the Declaration. But so does every man have a right to life. Now,
if we conceive these rights as operative within the Lockean state
of nature, we will immediately see that no man is under any neces-
sary obligation to respect any other man's rights. For example:
because I have a right to life, I have a right to kill any man
whom I have reason to believe might kill me. That is, I have
no obligation to respect the other man's right to life until he has
given me adequate pledges that he will not try to kill me. After
I have received such a pledge I have an obligation to him. But

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 325

I have this obligation then because, and only because, I have a
prior concern to preserve myself. By respecting his pledge I in-
crease my own safety. The same holds true of liberty: I have a
right to liberty, which right permits me to enslave anyone who,
I fear, might otherwise enslave me,

Jefferson once remarked, about the Negro's enslavement in
America, that justice was in one scale and self-preservation in the
other. Or, as he rhetorically asked on another occasion, shall we
present our slaves with freedom and a dagger? Jefferson never
hesitated in his answer: the Negro must continue to be enslaved
so long as, and to the degree that, his freedom might injure (or,
what came to the same tiling, might be believed to injure) the
white man. Lincoln, of course, was never an abolitionist and al-
ways granted the right of the slave states to continue the institu-
tion of slavery as long as they felt the kind of dangers that Jefferson
(in common with most Southerners) avowedly felt. Yet, when
Lincoln said that the policy of the Founding Fathers was to place
the institution of slavery where the public mind might rest in the
belief that it was in course of ultimate extinction, he was also
stretching their attitude to fit his theory rather than theirs. It would
have been truer to say that they hoped it was in course of ultimate
extinction than that they believed it was actually in course of
extinction. Allan Nevins' observation that "their expectations re-
garding its termination had been much more equivocal than their
hopes" is entirely justified. 16 We have quoted Jefferson's views in
an earlier chapter which show how badly he wobbled on the pros-
pect of future conditions favorable to Negro liberty.

To resume the theoretical analysis, we may say that no man,
from the strictly Lockean standpoint, is under an obligation to
respect any other man's unalienable rights until that other man
is necessary to the security of his own rights. Only men bound
to each other by the social contract are, in a strict sense, bound
to respect each other's unalienable rights. And so far are they from
being under the obligation to respect other men's rights that they
may loll or enslave other men whenever in their judgment this
adds to their own security. It would also be true, however, that
the enslaved Negroes always had the right to revolt and to kill
their masters. But the masters would have had no obligation to
free them until and unless the Negroes had the physical power
to make good their freedom. No one has ever expressed more
clearly or candidly this view of the right of revolution than Lin-

326 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

coin, in his speech on the Mexican War, when he said that "any
people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the
right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form
a new one that suits them better." 17 A people who are so servile
as to lack the desire for freedom, or who lack the power, do not in
any practical sense have the right. The "appeal to Heaven," the
ultima ratio juris, in which Locke's right of revolution culminates,
and through which the rights to life and liberty alone receive
their sanction, is the appeal to force. And those who do not have
force at their disposal have no effective Lockean argument for
denying the assertion of despotic power over them.

But if the foregoing is true, what interest did Jefferson and
those minded like him have in ultimate Negro emancipation or,
for that matter, in the emancipation of any one whom they could
profitably enslave? The answer, we believe, may be found (apart
from the matter of mere moral taste) in the concept of long-run
as opposed to short-run egotism. The freedom of a free, popular
republic depends upon the indoctrination of people everywhere
in their natural, unalienable rights. Security is a matter of freedom
from oppression at home and freedom from foreign domination.
The great Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, of which Jef-
ferson was such an ornament, was famous for nothing more than
for its cosmopolitanism. And the essence of this cosmopolitanism
lay in the conviction that only when the rights of man are secured
everywhere will they attain their maximum security anywhere. It
was expressed typically in the belief that republican governments
are unwarlike, because when the government is of the people,
when those whose blood and treasure pay for wars must decide
between war and peace, there will be no more aggressive wars,
no more wars for conquest or dynastic glory. 18 In this vein Jef-
ferson, in the passage from the Notes on Virginia quoted above, 19
feared that some day the Negro would rise up to enslave the white
man. In short, Jefferson really did believe, as did Lincoln, that he
who would not be a slave ought not to be a master. But the
Lockean root of Jefferson's conviction the deepest root for Jef-
ferson's generation regarded this precept as pre-eminently a
requirement of enlightened self-interest, as a long-run require-
ment of the security of the rights of the self -regarding, egotistical
individual. But in the short run, in the foreseeable future, there
could, from this viewpoint; be no pressing conscientious objection

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 327

to the continued enslavement of those whose slavery was not, but
whose emancipation would be, a threat to the masters. Jefferson,
it is true, did, in his eighteenth query, state one further objection
to slavery. It was that slavery engendered despotic manners, and
he implies (although he does not state) that such manners are
inimical to the spirit of free republican institutions. But this argu-
ment by itself is also a prudential one and is a condemnation of
slavery more for its effects upon the whites than for its wrong
to the Negroes. How inadequate it is may be seen by recollecting
that Burke, in his speech on conciliation with America, observes
the same effects that Jefferson does and draws the opposite con-
clusion. 20

Lincoln's morality then extends the full length of Jefferson's, but
it also goes further. Jefferson's horizon, with its grounding in
Locke, saw all commands to respect the rights of others as
fundamentally hypothetical imperatives: if you do not wish to be
a slave, then refrain from being a master. Lincoln agreed, but
he also said in substance: he who wills freedom for himself must
simultaneously will freedom for others. Lincoln's imperative was
not only hypothetical; it was categorical as well. Because all men
by nature have an equal right to justice, all men have an equal
duty to do justice, wholly irrespective of calculations as to self-
interest. Or, to put it a little differently, our own happiness, our
own welfare, cannot be conceived apart from our well-doing, or
just action, and this well-doing is not merely the adding to our
own security but the benefiting of others. Civil society, for Lin-
coln as for Aristotle and Burke, is a partnership "in every virtue
and in all perfection." And, while our duties to friends and fellow
citizens take precedence over duties to those who are not friends
or fellow citizens, the possibility of justice, and of injustice, exists
in every relationship with every other human being. Indeed, if
it was not possible to do justice to non-fellow citizens, the pos-
sibility of justice and friendship with fellow citizens would not
exist. For civil society is the realization of a potentiality which
must exist whenever man encounters his fellow, or it is not a
potentiality anywhere. And that potentiality, for Lincoln, found
its supreme expression in the proposition that "all men are created
equal."

According to Lincoln, the Douglas-Taney thesis with regard
to the Negro was historically false. We cannot but pronounce

328 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

Lincoln right and his opponents wrong; yet it should be under-
stood that Lincoln's affirmation of the Founders' and signers'
meaning, as distinct from his contradiction of Douglas and Taney,
is not itself impeccable on purely historical grounds. But if it is
not impeccable historically, it is superior on logical and moral
grounds to the doctrine it purports to interpret To what extent
Lincoln was conscious that his interpretation was "creative" we
cannot absolutely say. Yet we cannot forget that in the Lyceum
speech Lincoln warned that the Revolution was supported not
only by the sense of right but by the passions of the revolutionists,
both by the base passions of the people of hatred and revenge
and by the noble but dangerous passion of the leaders for fame
and distinction. And we cannot help noticing that the Lockean
interpretation of unalienable rights, which we have sketched,
ultimately views such rights as reducible to passions. 21 For the
right to life and liberty is held to be indefeasible in Locke just
because the passion for life, and for the necessary means thereto,
is held to be indefeasible. But when Lincoln said, as he repeatedly
did say in the debates, that Douglas's "Don't care" policy with
respect to slavery was an absurdity, because it tolerated the notion
that there was such a thing as a right to do wrong, he super-
imposed upon the Lockean doctrine of the unalienable right to
liberty a very different conception of right. The Lockean idea
of a right to liberty meant that no one can consistently appeal
to my sense of right to give up my liberty, but it does not mean
that a man who enslaves another violates the enslaver's sense
of what is right. Lincoln confounds the meaning of a right, mean-
ing an indefeasible desire or passion, with what is right, meaning
an objective state or condition in which justice is done. Lincoln
does not, however, deny that there are natural rights in the
Lockean sense; i.e., that there are indefeasible passions which
entitle all men to reject allegedly moral claims upon them which
are inconsistent with the gratification of these passions. 22 But
while the Lyceum speech conceded the adequacy of the notion
of natural right as the right of the passions, for the purposes of
the Revolutionary generation, it also denied its future utility.
"Passion has helped us; but can do so no more . . . Reason . . .
must furnish all the materials for our future support . . ." From
Lincoln's 1838 criticism of the Revolution we suspect that he was
not innocent of the nature of his subsequent "reconstruction" of
the meaning of the Fathers. For as passion is subjective so is rea-

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 329

son objective. The concept of what is right is the concept of an
objective condition, a condition discernible by reason. "All I ask
for the negro is that if you do not like him, let him alone," said
Lincoln with a pathos which anticipates the war years. But his
meaning is that the test of right is not how something agrees
with our passions but how it agrees with a discernment of what
is due to a man. Right conceived as subjective passion does not
forbid us to do what is objectively wrong; it only directs us to
do whatever we deem necessary for our lives and our liberty.
Right conceived as a state or condition in which every man is
rendered his due forbids us to dissociate the value to ourselves
of our own lives and liberties and the value to themselves of
the lives and liberties of any men who may be affected by our
actions.

Chapter XV

The Form and Substance of Political
Freedom in the Modern World

DOUGLAS'S policy with respect to slavery, we have said in an
earlier chapter, constituted a kind of agreement to disagree. The
desirability of such an agreement was predicated, in turn, upon
his belief that "we exist as a nation only by virtue of the Constitu-
tion*' and that therefore a scrupulous observance of all constitu-
tional duties was all that was really necessary for the states and
sections to live amicably together. Citizens of the several states
might continue to hold differing opinions on slavery because they
would abstain from any attempt to frame a joint policy on slavery,
an attempt which would inevitably produce collision. Lincoln,
however, categorically denied the whole foundation of this policy,
because Lincoln denied that we existed as a nation solely, or
even mainly, by virtue of the Constitution. This denial he was
to make the affirmative faith of the nation at Gettysburg, when
"fourscore and seven years ago" carefully placed the birth of the
nation in the year 1776, not the year 1787. And the life principle
of the nation was then said to be not the compromises of the
Constitution which Lincoln, as an honest man, always admitted
and freely accepted but in the dedication and rededication to
the equality of all men. The Constitution and the Union might
be regarded as formal causes of nationhood; although qua forms
they were certainly destined to metamorphosis: the Union by the
addition of new states, and the Constitution by amendments. But
the central proposition of the Declaration was its final cause. It
was common dedication to this which was the primary constituent

POMTICAJL FKEEBOM IN MODERN WOBID 331

element in our nationhood, and no change in the final cause was
possible which would not destroy the nation so constituted. Lin-
coln's attitude toward the "central idea" of American political
public opinion, which was also the central constitutive element
of American nationality, is again suggestive of a central them
of Aristotle's Politics, In the third book of that work Aristotle
asks, by virtue of what is it that the identity of a polls is estab-
lished? It is not because men inhabit a certain place, Aristotle
says, because a wall could be built around the Peloponnesus but
that would not make those so embraced fellow citizens. Similarly
it is not any particular group of citizens, for the citizens who
comprise a city (we might say nationals who comprise a nation)
are always changing, like the water in a river. A polis y Aristotle
says, is a partnership or association, a partnership in a politeia.
And the politeia is die form of the polls, as the soul is the form
of the body. 1 Therefore the polls is no longer the same when
the politeia changes, any more than a chorus is the same when
the persons who have comprised a tragic chorus now constitute
a comic chorus. The Greek word politeia has been employed
because it is usually translated constitution, as in the expression
American Constitution. But the Constitution is a set of laws, al-
beit fundamental laws. However, the politeia is not the laws but
rather the animating principle of the laws, by virtue of which
the laws are laws of a certain kind. Consequently Aristotle says,
a The laws should be laid down, and all people do lay them
down, to suit the potiteiai and not the politeiai to suit the laws."
This relationship is excellently expressed in a fragmentary writing
of Lincoln's which has no date and is ascribed to the period after
the 1858 campaign but before his inauguration. 2 The language
expresses more concisely and more beautifully the essential argu-
ment maintained by Lincoln throughout the debates on the
relationship of the Declaration of Independence to the Constitu-
tion and Union than anything in his actual speeches. It is a
meditation upon Proverbs 25; 11:

All this is not the result of accident. It has a philosophical
cause. Without the Constitution and the Union, we could
not have attained the result; but even these, are not the
primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something
back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human
heart That something, is the principle of ^Liberty to aE"-~

332 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

the principle that clears the path for all gives hope to all
and, by consequence, enterprize, and industry to all.

The expression of that principle, in our Declaration of
Independence, was most happy, and fortunate. Without this,
as well as with it, we could have declared our independence
of Great Britain; but without it, we could not, I think, have
secured our free government, and consequent prosperity.
No oppressed people will fight, and endure, as our fathers
did, without the promise of something better, than a mere
change of masters.

The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word,
"fitly spoken 9 which has proved an "apple of gold" to us.
The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver,
subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not
to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve
it. The picture was made for the apple not the apple for
the picture.

So let us act, that neither picture, or apple shall ever be
blurred, or bruised or broken.

That we may so act, we must study, and understand the
points of danger.

It would thus be no exaggeration to say that, according to Lincoln,
the relation of the famous proposition to the Constitution and
Union corresponded to the relation of soul to body. The breakup
of the Union would have been fatal from one point of view, but
what would it have availed for the body to have survived the
death of the soul? Douglas wished to preserve the Union of states
by a concession to that opinion which looked upon slavery as
a positive good. Douglas may not have agreed with that opinion
although his disagreement is highly equivocal, in that he always
endorsed the theory of racial inequality which justified Negro
slavery but his doctrine of popular sovereignty gave a stamp
of moral approval to the decision of any white majority to have
slavery. Douglas thought that only by recognizing the equality
of majorities of white Americans could the constitutional equality
of the states be maintained and therewith loyalty to the principle
of federal union. But, said Lincoln, the "central idea" of the
Republic is not "that 'all States as States, are equal* nor yet that
'all citizens as citizens are equal/ but . . . the broader, better
declaration, including both these and much more, that 'all men

POLITICAL FREEDOM IN MODERN WORLD 333

are created equal/ " 8 The idea of preserving constitutional equal-
ity by repudiating human equality was a moral and logical
monstrosity.

According to Lincoln, the extension or non-extension of slavery
in 1858 would be possible only in so far as the people of the
United States adopted, or repudiated, the view that slavery was
morally right and socially desirable. This, in turn, hinged upon
their denial of the universal meaning of the Declaration of
Independence or their return to its "ancient" meaning. The issue
that Douglas tried throughout the debates to make between him-
self and his opponent was that

Mr. Lincoln asserts as a fundamental principle of this
government, that there must be uniformity in the local laws
and domestic institutions of each and all the states of the
Union ... In other words, Mr. Lincoln advocates boldly
and clearly a war of sections, a war of the North against
the South, of the free states against the slave states a war
of extermination to be continued until the one or the other
shall be subdued and all the states shall either become free
or become slave.

Now, my friends ... I assert that it is neither desirable
nor possible that there should be uniformity in the local
institutions ... of the different states of this Union. ... I
therefore conceive that my friend, Mr. Lincoln, has totally
misapprehended the great principles upon which our govern-
ment rests . . . Uniformity is the parent of despotism the
world over, not only in politics but in religion. Wherever
the doctrine of uniformity is proclaimed, that all the states
must be free or slave, that all labor must be white or black,
that all the citizens of the different states must have the same
privileges or be governed by the same regulations, you have
destroyed the greatest safeguard which our institutions have
thrown around the rights of the citizen. 4

Douglas has gained great credit among historians for his accurate
prognostication that the end result of Lincoln's policy would be
a war between the states culminating in the final overthrow of
freedom or slavery. Lincoln never denied that such a war was
possible, but he insisted that it was no part of his intention to
bring it about. And he would not be frightened from his policy

334 THE GASE FOR LINCOLN

by threats of war against it Douglas's assertion that Lincoln in-
sisted upon uniformity is, however, true in a certain sense. But
in the sense in which it is true Douglas himself also demanded
uniformity. For if such an aphorism as Douglas's "uniformity is
the parent of despotism" is true, then Douglas must have believed
it was as desirable that there be uniformity of conviction on t his
as Lincoln believed it was desirable to have uniformity of con-
viction on the moral wrong of slavery. The only true issue was
what are the convictions and hence what are the institutions
with respect to which it is desirable to have uniformity and what
are the ones with respect to which diversity is either permissible
or desirable, or both. Lincoln insisted that the diversity which
sprang from soil and climate or the diversity which sprang from
religious freedom was both permissible and desirable. But slav-
ery was not such a thing. A free people cannot disagree, or
agree to disagree, on the relative merits of freedom and despot-
ism. If the majority favors despotism, it is no longer a free people,
whether the form of the government has already changed or not.
Jefferson had said: "If there be any among us who would wish
to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them
stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error
of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat
it" Yet the change of opinion in the South, from the age of
Washington and Jefferson, who treated slavery as a necessary
evil to be gradually done away with, to the present positive good
school, culminating in the open denial of equal human rights,
had also led to the virtually complete suppression of divergent
opinion there. When Senator Foote of Mississippi had in 1848
invited Senator Hale of New Hampshire to visit Mississippi and
grace the highest tree in the forest there (which earned him
the sobriquet of Hangman Foote), Hale responded by inviting
Foote to New Hampshire, where he assured him a respectful
hearing in every town and hamlet. Wherever the view that slavery
was a positive good gained the ascendancy, a political demand
arose for the purge of all dissenting opinion. The culmination
of this trend, which came after the joint debates, was Douglas's
Senate speech, following John Brown's raid, in which he called
for a criminal sedition law which would have banned the Repub-
lican party as effectively as any law proposed by the late Senator
McCarthy would have banned the Communist party. With the
repudiation of human equality vanished the genius of republican

POLITICAL FBEEBOM IN MODERN WOBID 335

freedom. The idea that any society can subsist without an agree-
ment upon fundamentals is, of course, a delusion. But it is pecul-
iarly true of a republican society, where the opinion of all the
people enters into the government. Every "agreement to disa-
gree" presupposes a prior agreement with respect to which
disagreement can not be tolerated. According to Lincoln, it was
Intolerable that the American people disagree upon the principle
of the abstract equality of all men. In so far as they did so they
were no longer one nation.

The doctrine of popular sovereignty, as interpreted by Douglas,
was the miner and sapper, which was preparing just such a change
of opinion in the North as had already come over the South.
It was impossible in 1858 to say to the great majority of the North
that slavery was right. But by treating it as if it was not wrong
Douglas went as far as it was possible to go in that direction.
While the great majority still believed in the principle of freedom,
Lincoln held, it was the course of wisdom to have an authoritative
showdown at the polls, a showdown that would place despotism
beyond the pale of hope of its advocates. That those who would
not be able to resist the decision of the ballots might have recourse
to bullets never frightened Lincoln, nor must it frighten any man
who believes in free government That is the true answer to those
who hold Douglas wise in seeing the possibility of war in Re-
publican victory. In the end it was the answer Douglas himself
gave to the South.

Douglas, Lincoln said, professed not to care whether slavery
was voted up or down, but this was the very thing about which
nearly every man in the country* North or South, cared and cared
deeply. As Lincoln said repeatedly, he believed he had no right,
and he professed no inclination, to use the power of the federal
government to interfere with slavery in the states. But he was
convinced that the decision as to whether slavery was to be
permitted in the territories would determine, indirectly, whether
slavery would eventually become lawful in all the states. And
this decision was not, could not be considered, a local one. It
was not a question for Kansas alone. It concerned (M the people,
and it was a decision for all to make. 5 A free people cannot
allow the most vital question concerning its future to go by de-
fault Hamilton had written in the first Federalist, Tft has been
frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the

TBB FOB MNCOJJST

of this by their conduct and example, to decide

the question, whether societies of men are really

or not of good government from refection

and or they are forever destined to depend for

constitutions on accident and force/* Lincoln did

not it was possible to perpetuate a government dedicated

to a truth, a government intended to incorporate the

of rational choice, by a pretense of indifference to the

of all political choices, the choice between

According to Lincoln, a free people cannot disagree on the
of and despotism without ceasing, to the

of the to be a free people. In choosing to enslave

It is impossible not to concede the Justice of one's
Hie commitment to freedom must simultane-
ously be a commitment to justice, and the idea of a freedom
to be en Just would imply, by equal reason, a freedom to be unfree.
and fustiee are, in IJncoIn's vocabulary, distinguishable,
are as Inseparable as the concavity and the convexity
of a curved line. The most concise expression of Lincoln's reason-
fag on the theme may be found in another of his great
In lie distilled the essence of arguments which
discursively thrcmgbcwit the debates* It too is undated.

If A, can prove, however oondusively, that he may, of right,
B~why may not B. snatch the same argument, and

that he may enslave A?

You say A. is white* and B. is black It is cctor 9 then; the

the to enslave the darker? Take care.

By yon are to be dave to the first maa you meet,

a your own.

You do not actiy? You mean the whites are

the of the blacks, and, there! ore have

the to than? Take care again. By this rule, you

are to be to the man you meet, with an intellect

to own.

But; ty it is a of interest; and, if you can

It yo or you have the right to ensla ve another,

If I can it his interest, be has the

to yoct

POfflXGAL IN WOBLD 337

The agamst the claim of intellectual superiority, the

only serious argument in favor of slavery, was one which Lincoln

apparently inherited from Clay. In a speech at Edwards-
viHe* lliaoiSj September 11, 1858, when the campaign was far
advanced, Lincoln read to Ms audience the following

from a letter written by Clay in 1849;

I know there are those who draw an argument in favor
of slavery from the alleged Intellectual inferiority of the black
race. Whether this argimient is founded in fact or not, I
will not now stop to inquire* but merely say that if it proves
anytihiBg at all, it proves too much. It proves that
the white races of the world any one might properly be ea-
slaved by any other wMdh had made greater advances in
civilizatioxL And, if this role applies to nations there is no
reason why it should not apply to individuals; and it might
easily be proved that the wisest man in the world could
rightfully reduce all other men and women to bondage/

It should be noted from the foregoing that

Lincoln nor Cky attempts to the claims of intellectual

superiority; what they maintain is that the consequences of ad-
nutting such claims are such as none of who raise them

are prepared to accept To raise such claims is an act of
folly, and an act of foly cannot vindicate an of

tual superiority or wisdom! As Lincoln remarked in of

his fragments, "Although volume upon volume is to prove

slavery a very good things, we never of the man who
to take the good of it % It is

in such remarks that a wise man would Ms

superiority in wisdom, Other wise men* we may
recognize his wisdom by reason of own, the foly erf

the fool is the very thing that It

These is no sorer sign that a is a or a Ms

daim to rule other men because he is *flm

of the case of al who or divine* far

of is by Uaccda

For we wil tike Dr. b*s *

m& tike Is* T ft die Wffl of GoA

Sambo a or be set Tie Al-
mighty no to the Ms

338 THE CASE FOB MNCOLH

revelationthe Bible gives none or, at most, none but such
as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning. No one thinks of
asking Sambo's opinion on it So, at last, it comes to this, that
Dr. Ross is to decide the question. And while he considers it,
he sits in the shade, with gloves on his hands, and subsists
on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun. If he
decides that God Wills Sambo to continue a slave, he thereby
retains his own comfortable position; but if he decides that
God wills Sambo to be free, he thereby has to walk out of
the shade, throw off Ms gloves, and delve for his own bread.
Will Dr. Ross be actuated by that perfect impartiality, which
has ever been considered most favorable to correct deci-
sions? 8

"Slavery," Lincoln had said in his Peoria speech, the first in which
he came to grips publicly with the peculiar institution, "is founded
in the selfishness of man's nature opposition to it, in his love of
Justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when
brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them,
shocks, and throes, and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.** 9

For Lincoln was convinced that slavery was rooted in human
selfishness, and the arguments advanced to justify it were per-
versions of reason, designed to quiet the sense of Justice which
must ever denounce the act of enslavement whenever it presents
itself to a man in its true character. It was impossible to vindicate
a claim to self-government, which was at lie same time the as-
sertion of a right to be unjust. Political freedom could only be
vindicated, Lincoln believed, on the grounds that it led to greater
justice between man and man than a system in which there was
no political freedom,

But we are then confronted with this paradox; if just govern-
ment is based upon the consent of the governed, what right to
govern inheres in those who claim political rights not on the basis
of equality but on the basis of their superiority? What right to
govern is there in a community which does not believe in
government by the consent of the governed? Curiously enough,
the case of the white South before the Civil War resembled in
one striking particular the case of the Negroes which it asserted
a right to enslave. That is to say, the whites said the Negroes
were deficient in civilized qualities, but, by Lincoln's definition,
the whites who denied the Declaration were in a crucial respect

POXXEICAt, KBEEDOM IN MODERN WOKLSD 339

also uncivilized. Douglas, expressing the view of the South,
said at Ottawa:

Now, I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended
the negro to be the equal of the white man. If he did, he has
been a long time demonstrating that fact For thousands of
years the negro has been a race upon the earth, and during
all that time, in all latitudes and climates, wherever he has
wandered or been taken, he has been inferior to the race
which he has there met. He belongs to an inferior race, and
must always occupy an inferior position. 10

In order to understand Lincoln's reaction to Douglas's tiresome
reiteration of this theme, one must first do credit to the element
of truth which it contains. One need not even inquire into its
historical accuracy, as far as "thousands of years" is concerned,
in order to see that, within the framework of nineteenth-century
civilization, the ascendancy of the civilization of western Europe
over that of the peoples of Africa and Asia was unchallenged and
appeared unchallengeable. But, to put the case in its hardest
form, the promulgation of the doctrines of the Enlightenment,
of the principles of political freedom as proclaimed in the English
Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776, and the
French Revolution of 1789, was aU the work of Western men and
of white men. The great tragedy of the Negro in America, as
of other non- Western peoples since, lay in the fact that he was
compelled to appeal for the recognition of his natural rights to
white men and that he could not point to their recognition by
black men elsewhere; for it was undeniably true that no govern-
ment of black men anywhere had yet secured the equal rights of
black men in the sense that this government of white men secured
the equal rights of its citizens. From this point of view it must be
conceded that Negroes did come from an "inferior civilization/*
that is, from a civilisation in which there was no recognition of the
universal equal rights of man. However, this argument, as Henry
Cky would say, also proves too much. For it is also true that in
western Europe, whence the doctrine of universal equal rights
emanated, there had beaa no general recognition of these equal
rights until the eighteenth century. The monarchies of the West-
ern world, with few exceptions, and those very recent, did not
recogpoibze such rights. And it was not until 1776 that any nation
had been founded upon the explicit recognition of such rights. In

THE CASE FOB JJNCOIN

short, if Douglas's argument were to be taken seriously, It would
prove -that the Almighty had waited many thousands of years to
demonstrate the capacity of .the white man, no less than that of the
Negro, for self-government

We have already quoted from John Stuart Mill's essay, "On
Liberty ,* published in 1859, to the effect that "despotism is a
legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, pro-
vided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by
actually effecting that end.** It must, we believe, be conceded that
the justice of despotism is not absolutely and unequivocally re-
futed by Lincoln's argument For it follows as a necessary implica-
tion of the Declaration itself that, in Mill's words, "Liberty, as a
principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to
the time when mankind have become capable of being improved
by free and equal discussion," In other words, in a world that
is duped and befuddled by the obscurantism practiced upon their
peoples and upon themselves by, e.g., feudal kings and nobles, or
in a world in which the souls of savage peoples are locked within
the dark night of primeval barbarism, self-government of the
people is inconceivable. But the right of revolution announced
in the Declaration, the right to use force against those who would
deny us the security of our natural rights to life and liberty,
is obviously applicable against corrupt or degraded peoples as
well as against rulers of this description. The right to revolution
is a right to use violence against anyone who would deny us
the enjoyment of our rights. From this viewpoint an enlightened
minority has the same right to use force against a brutal majority
as an enlightened majority has against a brutal king. And, if the
minority or majority which is brutalized cannot be eixiled, it must
be ruled despotically until such time as it can justly be admitted
to a share in government And this argument, be it noted, although
it lends color to the enslavement of the Negroes in the South,
equally justified the destruction of the Confederacy by war and
the institution of reconstruction governments which certainly
ruled arbitrarily. The South, in denying the equal natural rights of
the Negro, not only denied the foundation of its own rights; it
denied as well its own competence to exercise these fights.

Was there an element of self-contradiction in Lincoln's position
in that it denounces any recognition of a right to despotic rule and
yet contemplates violence against those who assart a right to des-
potic rule? We maintain that there is not Lincoln had grappled

FBJSESDOM IN MODEBN WOBID 341

with this problem, and solved ft, in the Lyceum speech. It is
true that some men are so superior to other men that they might,
in theory, justly rule them without the other men's consent But
such a right does not require recognition in the sense that uni-
versal equal rights must be recognized. It is the nature of superior
men, the very essence of their superiority, that it cannot be
gratified by exploiting other men. It is the renunciation of the
power of exploitation which alone can gratify their sense of
superiority. Hence those who use the argument of superiority to
enslave as the Rev. Dr. Rossare not superior men. Where men
are enlightened meaning thereby where they recognize the
moral necessity of the doctrine of equal natural rights they are
capable of being improved by rational discussion, to use Mill's
phrase. It is the function of the great man, the sign of his mastery,
that he employs his powers by confirming and enhancing his fel-
low citizens* capacity for self-improvement and chastens any
backsliding from the convictions that entitle them to be consid-
ered rational men. The great man, be he a Washington or another,
will not force the wills of those who will not themselves coerce
the wills of others, except to secure their own rights. But neither
will rational men hesitate to use force to secure their rights.
And it does not matter, in principle, whether the threat to that
security comes from the one or die many, the majority or the
minority.

The foregoing reflections obtrude upon us another difficulty
which must lead us for the moment beyond the horizon of the
debates proper. It will be seen from what we have just said what
the underlying ''necessity^ was that, in Lincoln's words, justified
the Founding Fathers in tolerating slavery. That necessity was,
on the one hand, the avarice of slaveowners, which was too strong
to be overcome, and, on the other, the actual condition of
degradation of their slaves, partly an inheritance from Africa and
partly the consequence of the brutaHzation of slavery. It was
axiomatic for Lincoln that the slavery of the Negroes could be
extenuated only on the supposition that the institution was "in
course of ultimate octiacti0n^ and this in turn could only be
contemplated if the Negroes were* in some sense, being prepared
for freedom. In his eulogy of Henry Cky, Lincoln quoted the

342 THE CASE FOR UNCOLN

following from Clay's speech to the American Colonization Society
in 1827:

There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa
her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by
the ruthless hand of fraud and violence. Transplanted in a
foreign land, they will carry back to their native soil the
rich fruits of religion, civilization, law and liberty. May it
not be one of the great designs of the Ruler of the universe,
(whose ways are often inscrutable by short-sighted mortals,)
thus to transform an original crime, into a signal blessing
to that most unfortunate portion of the globe? 11

That the enslavement of Negroes was "just" in a qualified sense,
so long as they were being prepared for freedom, must, we
believe, be conceded. But what of the "crime 1 * of their enslave-
ment? Lincoln once complained of the Liberty party men, who
would not vote for Henry Clay because he owned slaves, that
they had helped elect Polk in his stead and thus helped to bring
on the Mexican War and with it the extension of slavery. The
Liberty men said, "We are not to do evil that good may come," to
which Lincoln replied, "By the fruit the tree is to be known.
An evil tree can not bring forth good fruit. If the fruit of electing
Mr. Clay would have been to prevent the extension of slavery,
could the act of electing have been evil?" 12 But the same argu-
ment may be turned to the question of the American Negro's
original enslavement. If we are to know the tree by its fruit, and
if the final fruit of the African slave trade was to be tibe possession
by Africans of the infinitely precious doctrine of equal human
rights and the possibility of erecting an edifice of human freedom,
which could only be built upon such a teaching, how can we
regard the means to such an end as a crime? To say that God
alone may do evil that good may come cannot, we should think,
be regarded as more than an evasion.

We have in a number of places suggested analogies between
Lincoln's moral teaching, as a foundation for his political teach-
ing, and Aristotle's. Such an analogy must seem paradoxical in
the light of the reputation of the one as the great defender of
slavery and the other as its supreme antagonist Yet the paradox,
we maintain, lies more in their reputations than to the truth,
Aristotle's vindication of natural slavery, in the first book of his
Politics, is a defense of the slavery of the man who lacks sufficient

POLITICAL FREEDOM IN MODERN WOULD 343

reason to guide himself and can only live a useful life when some-
one else directs him. This has reference primarily to the mentally
feeble, and no society gives such men their freedom, whether
it allows them to be made chattels or puts them in institutions.
It would also refer to those who, for whatever reason, are in-
corrigiblethe Calibans of this world and all such men are also
put under restraint in one way or another*

But Aristotle clearly envisaged the continued existence of a
slavery which is not natural in any of the foregoing senses, which
is, therefore, merely conventional and which is, therefore, by his
own terms, unjust. In book seven of the Politics Aristotle repeat-
edly speaks of the employment of slaves in his best polity, a
polity which is either tie most just possible or which embodies
the greatest degree of justice generally attainable by the poleis of
his time. Superficially this would stand in marked contrast to Lin-
coln's summons to recognize the natural equality of rights of all
mankind. But only superficially. For in the ninth chapter of the
seventh book Aristotle remarks, "Why it is better for all slaves
to have freedom set before them as a prize (or reward), we
will say later." This promise is not kept in any surviving portions
of the Politics, which appears to be fragmentary. The passage
indicates, however, two things; first, that the slaves Aristotle has
in mind are slaves not by nature but by convention only; and,
secondly, that slaves who are slaves by convention only should
have their slavery **in course of ultimate extinction/* For Aristotle,
no less than Lincoln, the hope and, by consequence, the virtuous
activity which liberty engenders must not be shut out of the heart
of the slave.

But Aristotle, unlike Lincoln, definitely sanctions "slave catch-
ing* and envisages a more or less steady supply of slaves, probably
always as great as the number set free. Why? The answer, we
believe, is somewhat as follows. Aristotle regarded civilization as
limited primarily, though not exclusively, to Greeks. This certainly
was not because he thought Greeks alone capable of becoming
civilized, since he thought that non-Greeks captured and en-
slaved by Greeks could be made fit for freedom by the training
provided by Greek life. It was because civilization in the world
he knew was a rare and difficult plant and, in fact, existed only
in extremely fortunate drcumstances. Its existence elsewhere was
always possible but extremely improbabla The enslavement of
barbarians by Greeks was then justified by the fact that it was

344 TKK GAS FOR

probably the only way in which, barbarians could be civilized.
That slave labor contributed to the material elevation of Greek
life certainly did not detract from the element of justice in slavery
from Aristotle's point of view. The economic scarcity of the
ancient world-in contrast to the rapidly increasing abundance
of the world Lincoln knew must also be taken into consideration
in accounting for the degree of toleration each has for a phe-
nomenon which was intrinsically unjust from either's point of

view.

But there is this further difference. The revolution which began
in 1776 was, according to Lincoln, only the beginning of a world
revolution. In his Mexican War speech of January 12, 1848, Lincoln
referred to the right of revolution proclaimed in the Declaration
as "a most valuable, a most sacred right a right which, we hope
and believe, is to liberate the world." Lincoln had seen in his own
lifetime virtually the whole of Central and South America "revo-
lutionize/' And he had seen Texas successfully revolt from Mexico
after Mexico had revolted from Spain. Within two lifetimes two
whole continents had undergone revolutions in the name of the
doctrines of the Declaration; and, although Europe's experience
had been less happy, the foundations of absolutism had repeat-
edly been shaken by unsuccessful revolutions, and the confidence
of European liberals in ultimate success was high. In these cir-
cumstances Lincoln felt, with Webster, that our prime duty as a
nation was to set an example of a free republic dedicated to
elevating the conditions of life of its own people without any
spirit of aggrandizement toward men elsewhere. In the contest of
Lincoln and Douglas we may see the issue of the last great
Whig-Democratic contest redefined, the issue in the campaign of
Clay and Polk. This issue we may call the issue of internal
improvement versus external conquest and aggression. Lincoln's
summons to fidelity to the Declaration is the phoenix risen from
the ashes of the old Whig call for internal improvement, but the
concept of internal improvement has been purified and trans-
formed to mean the improvement of the nation's souL Internal
improvement versus foreign aggression is interpreted by Lincoln,
in his contest with Douglas, in precisely the sense in which
Socrates interprets those concepts in Plato's Republic. When
Glaucon rejects the city of primitive moral health, the **city
of pigs," it is because he demands luxuries, luxuries which he
thinks it is more troublesome to do without than to purchase

POUIIGAX, FREEDOM IN MODEEN WOBU> 345

by aggressive wax. AH of Douglas's policies pointed to ag-
gressive war as the solution of Internal difficulties, difficulties
which Lincoln, like Plato, believed could be avoided only
through moral restraint. Lincok saw the road of aggression,
whether of the individual or of the nation, as a road of endless
involvement, aggression begetting aggression, with the end never
nearer. In a world of growing interdependence, particularly the
moral interdependence created by the principles of the Declara-
tion itself, this course had become peculiarly impossible* For the
Declaration of Independence was the first case in history in which
a single people made a national revolution on the assumption
that its particular principles were, simultaneously, the universal
principles which civilized men everywhere would recognize. The
Declaration assumed that its potential, if not its actual addressees,
embraced the entire family of man. AIM! it did not think of these
addressees as some few **wise men * who, like the ancient Stoics,
might live in the interstices of society in widely scattered lands.
The Declaration assumed a mass audience throughout the world,
capable, sooner or later, of acting upon the principles it an-
nounced. There never was a time in the ancient world when a
statement of universal principles of right could have been made
with the assumption of such an audience. And once the cause
of political freedom had been indissolubly associated with such
a statement of principles, it could only be maintained by associat-
ing with such principles an example of moral restraint, an example
of respect for the rights of men everywhere.

For Aristotle, as for Lincoln, the slavery of men who were mor*
aUy and intellectually capable of managing their own lives
without injury to others was intriMically unjust For Lincoln, as
for Aristotle, there were ^necessities" which justified the tolera-
tion of slavery, which made it a lesser evil, "Cast into life where
slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated/* Lincoln
said of Henxy Clay in Ms eulogy of his great and revered leader,
**h did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived,
how it could of once be eradicated, without producing a greater
evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.** 18 That there
was a difference in world between Aristotle and Lincoln may
be conceded, but that there was a difference in principle* as
to tibe Intrinsic justice of slavery, must be doubted. This, we be-
Heve^ is true even if It is ako true that fa Aristotle's world the
Institution of slavery m distinct from the slavery of individual

346 THE CASE FOR 1UNCOIN

menwould always be among the lesser evils and thus could
never jj^ wisely placed *in course of ultimate extinction.** In Lin-
coln's world the chronic economic scarcity which was among the
justifications of ancient slavery did not exist. If in Aristotle's world
the possibility of leisure, and hence the cultivation of the liberal
arts, depended in some ways on slavery, the reverse was true in
Lincoln's world. In 'the nineteenth century freedom, not slavery,
was productive of economic abundance. The machine was the
slave of the modem world, and property in man by man could not
be defended on moral grounds except as a temporary expedient
Whether Lincoln's world or Aristotle's world was the better world,
whether the hope engendered by the machine, of the final
abolition of human exploitation, outweighs the fears engendered
by this same machine, is a question upon which we need not
enter here. It was not a question for Lincoln, since he was called
upon to act in a world already governed by the potentialities
of the machine, for good and for evil.

In concluding this analysis we would observe that, although
the relationship of a master to one who is a slave, not by nature,
but by convention only, is always intrinsicaEy unjust, there is no
way of knowing, a priori, whether it is just or unjust, whether
it is a greater or a lesser evil, to sanction such a relationship
in particular cases, For it is the essence of practical wisdom to
adapt its judgments to differences in circumstances. The purpose
of practical wisdom is always the same, and the wise statesman
will act to achieve the greatest measure of justice that the world
in which he is acting admits.

Chapter XVI
Popular Sovereignty: True and False

LINCOLN constantly warned those who would either approve or
withhold their disapproval of slavery that this was a matter upon
which, In principle, there oould be no compromise or equivoca-
tion. To those Southerners who appealed to the Bible to justify
slavery he said that Douglas was wiser than they, for Biblical
slavery was the slavery of white men. We have given it as our
opinion, in Chapter II, that for Douglas the essence of free gov-
ernment lay in the power of decision of a free people of the
most vital, no less than of the most trivial, questions. Lincoln
agreed, but he believed that shifting responsibility for the future
of the nation upon the first few stragglers into Kansas or Nebraska
was a miserable evasion of responsibility. And Douglas's assump-
tion, in his *Don*l care** policy, that the doctrine of popular
sovereignty was such that the duty of statesmanship was ex-
hausted when the people's power of decision was secured to them
was absolutely false, Lincoln's classic refutation of this thesis may
be found in the Peoria speech;

The doctrine of self-government is rightabsolutely and
eternally right, but it has no just application, as hare at-
tempted Or perhaps I should say that whether it has such
application depends upon whether the negro is not or is a
man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man
may, as a matter of sdtf-govemment* do just as he pleases
with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent
a total dbstractton of self-govatraneot, to say that he too
shall not govern himmlf? When the white man governs Mm-
self that is seK-govarnmeoat; but when he governs himself.

348 THE CASE FOR UNCQZN

and also governs another man, that is more than self-govern-
mentthat is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my
ancient faith teaches me that "all men are created equal;**
and that there can be no moral right in connection with one
man's making a slave of another.

Judge Douglas frequently, with bitter irony and sarcasm,
paraphrases our argument by saying; *The white people of
Nebraska are good enough to govern themselves, but they
are not good enough to govern a few miserable negroesir

Well I doubt not that the people of Nebraska axe, and
will continue to be as good as the average of people else-
where. I do not say the contrary. What I do say is, that no
man is good enough to govern another man, without that
others consent. I say this is the leading principle the sheet
anchor of American republicanism. 1

Free government, according to Lincoln, was not the mare process
of arriving at decisions without coercion by any formula embody-
ing the principle of majority rule. It was not even government
of, by, and for the people. It was government of, by, and for
a people dedicated to a certain proposition. Many of those
present-day admirers of Douglas who remember the end of the
Gettysburg Address forget its beginning. Lincoln's position always
embraced both concepts, while Douglas never comprehended
the meaning of the principle of equality, nor its relation to popular
sovereignty, properly so called.

If self-government was a rfgfctf, and not a mare fact character-
izing the American scene (more or less), then it must be derived
from some primary source of obligation. There must be something,
Lincoln insisted, inhering in each man, as a man, which created
an obligation in every other man. And if any majority anywhere,
however constituted, might rightfully enslave any man or men,
it could only be because there was nothing in any man which,
simply because he was a man, other men were bound to respect
If the latter were true, as Douglas implied, then the mere exist-
ence anywhere of the phenomenon of self-government said noth-
ing as to its rightness or desirability. It might exist because of
merely fortuitous circumstances or of beliefs which had no support
beyond the fact of their being believed. It would then be mean-
ingless to say that anyone had a duty to perpetuate a self-
governing polity or to bring one into existence where there was

KXUTECAL ramosopHT OF A YOTOTG WHIG 349

none. Since Douglas did not indicate any other groBnd than
Lincoln's as the foundation of his doctrine of popular sovereignty,
he was utterly illogical in claiming for it the status of an eternal
principle of political right

Douglas's popular sovereignty, sanctioning as it did the enslave-
ment of one description of men by another, of necessity sanc-
tioned the enslavement of any other description of men. Douglas
affirmed 'the right to enslave only as a right of the white race
in dealing with all other races (which were "inferior" and had no
right to self-government, according to Douglas). But Douglas
simply had not thought through the implications of such a posi-
tion. Why, if a white majority, whether in a state or in the nation,
decided to enslave a white minority (or to deprive it of political
rights or otherwise act in a manner that tibe Declaration of
Independence would classify as "despotic 1 *), might it not right-
fully do so? If one answers that such actions would he contrary to
the Constitution, the reply follows that any constitution is merely
a document of positive law and that the same "sovereign people**
which establishes it may alter or abolish, by constitutional or
revolutionary measures, any imbibitions to its own authority. More-
over, as Lincoln saw by 1857, a constitutional majority, in the
sense of the amending clause of the Constitution, is not necessary
to amend that document in any real sense. The majorities which
elect President and Congress can, on any point upon which they
are really agreed, do anything they wish. For President and
Congress together can always reconstitute, overrule, or disregard
the Supreme Court DF, then, one majority might, without vio-
lating any fundamental moral principle, enslave one minority,
whatever its color or composition, there as no principle, cer-
tainly none involved in the mere idea of majority rule, which
would inhibit it from enslaving another. And if one minority after
another is enslaved, the majority itself becomes a minority. In
short, the idea of a popular sovereignty divorced from a universal
conception of human right is a complete absurdity.

Lincoln's second question to Douglas at Freeport is rightly
famous, for it was the immediate cause of the most significant
political effects. Yet it is the third question, to which we have
already adverted, which leads most directly to the heart of the
issues between the two men. TGE the Supreme Court of the United
States shall decide that states can not exclude slavery from their

THE CASE FOE LINCOLN"

limits, are you in favor of acquiescing in, adopting and f Glowing
such decision as a rale of political action?'' ran this interrogatory.
In contrast to Douglas's downright, although indefensible, answer
to the second question, Ms reply to the foregoing is completely
evasive. At Freeport in his initial reply he spoke thus: "I am
amazed that Lincoln should ask such a question. (*A school boy
knows better/) Yes, a school boy knows better. Mr. Lincoln's
object is to cast an imputation upon the Supreme Court ... He
casts an imputation upon the Supreme Court of the United States
by supposing that they would violate the Constitution of the
United States. I tell him such a thing is not possible. It would be
an act of moral treason that no man on the bench could ever
descend to." Thus, instead of giving an answer, Douglas says
the question is improper because it assumes an impossibility. Yet
whether or not the Court would decide that states might not
prohibit slavery, nothing is more evident than that it was pos-
sible, fust as it was possible for the justices to go insane. If mental
or moral incompetence on the part of Supreme Court justices were
impossible, why should the Constitution permit their impeach-
ment? Lincoln hammered away at this vital flaw in Douglas's
armor and at Quincy received the following response, which was
the last he was to receive, to the third Freeport question:

But, Mr. Lincoln says -that I will not answer Ms question
as to what I would do in the event of the court making so
ridiculous a decision as he imagines they would by deciding
that the free state of Illinois could not prohibit slavery within
her own limits. 1 tM him at Freeport why I would not answer
mch a question. I told him that there was not a man possess-
ing any brains in America, lawyer or not, who ever dreamed
that such a thing could be done. I told him then, as I say
now, that by all the principles set forth in the Dred Scott
decision, it is impossible. I told him then, as I do now, that
it is an insult to men's understanding, and a gross calumny
on the court, to presume in advance that it was going to
degrade itself so low as to make a decision known to be in
direct violation of the Constitution. 2

At this point in the speech a voice from the audience was heard
to say, The same thing was said about the Dred Scott decision
before it passed." That voice, with all that it implied, may well
pass as the true voice of the muse of History. We have italicized

KIPULAR SOVEKEIGNTYS TRUE AND FALSE 351

the sentence in which Douglas admits -that he has not and will not
answer Lincoln's question. And the expressed reasons for the re-
fusal are, of course, inadmissible, Douglas had referred to Lincoln
at Chicago at the beginning of the campaign (July 9, 1858) as
a 'land, amiable, and intelligent gentleman, a good citizen and
an honorable opponent* 7 Perhaps Douglas hoped to tame Lincoln
and bring him over to the Greeley view with 'this "nice doggy**
approach. If so, he must have been soon disenchanted. At any
rate, this "intelligent" man, who happened also to be a lawyer
of some distinction, certainly did believe the decision in question
was possible, and he had convinced many thousands that it was
possible. This Douglas knew, and in saying that no one believed
it he was saying what he must have known to be false. Lincoln
had, moreover, at Galesburg, demonstrated by irrefragable logic,
as we have shown, that such a decision did not contradict the
principles of the Dred Scott decision, at least as set forth in the
Chief Justice's opinion, which was the opinion of the Court. And
Douglas never undertook to grapple with Lincoln's syllogism. He
did not because he could not.

To that unnamed voice Douglas replied by repeating what lie
had said in substance just before the passage we have quoted:
M . . . I will not be drawn off into an argument upon the merits
of the Dred Scott decision. It is enough for me to know that
the Constitution of the United States created the Supreme Court
for the purpose of deciding all disputed questions touching the
true construction of that instrument . . /* Of course, that the
Supreme Court was entrusted with deciding "all disputed ques-
tions" was itself a disputed point in the debates. Everyone knew
that the Constitution itself says nothing of the kind. Lincoln, as
we have observed, cited Jefferson and Jackson to the effect that
each officer of the government must uphold the Constitution as
he understands it Douglas was transfixed on a sharply thrown
spear, and no wriggling could do more than fix the spear more
firmly,

Douglas's crucial statement in his reply to Lincoln was his
assertion that Lincoln's question implied that the judges were
capable of "moral treason,** This, of course, is precisely what
Lincoln believed. Not only did he believe the judges capable
of moral treason, but he believed they had actually committed it
For Lincoln believed that moral treason consisted, above all, in
denying tike proposition that "all men are created equal" or in

TOE CASE FOR ZINCOI-N

denying that this was in fact the foundation of the American
constitutional system. Douglas was not logically required to ac-
cept Lincoln's definition of moral treason, but it was no less fatal
to the logic o his position to invoke the concept of such treason.
For the very idea of moral treason means that there is a higher,
substantive principle to which the idea of "legal treason" must
be subordinate. To have invoked such a concept and then to
have affirmed a readiness to accept the political consequences
of the decisions of the Supreme Court, whatever they might be,
made no sense. If moral treason is more heinous than legal
treason, then one who unquestioningly obeys a bad law (or legal
enactment, such as a court decision) must in principle be in-
ferior to one who is prepared to disobey it And, by equal
reason, to change the law from what is morally right to what
is morally wrong e.g., to change free kw into slave law must in
principle be as great a wrong as disobedience to morally good
law. Lincoln, in the Lyceum speech, in Ms most extreme plea
for obedience to law a plea which was, of course, not for obedi-
ence to any laws, but to those of a free republichad said that
laws, "if not too intolerable," should always be borne with. And
he could not have said more, unless he, too, had forgotten the
right of revolution proclaimed in the Declaration. To repeat: for
Douglas to say it was enough for him to know that the Court had
decided something, without inquiring into the merits of the
decision, was to imply that there was no higher standard than
positive law; but, if there was no such standard, then the idea
of moral treason was meaningless. In fact, however, Douglas
attempted, as we have seen, to make "popular sovereignty^ play
a role equivalent to "all men are created equal** i& supplying
the substance of an idea of intrinsic morat-political worth* But
"popular sovereignty," we have also seen, is reducible to the
proposition that all political right is positive right. Douglas would
no more inquire into the merits of a decision of "the people** than
he would inquire into the merits of the decision of the Court In
this, at least, he was consistent.

While the third question is the fundamental question put to
Douglas at Freeport, the "Freeport question" Itself must not go
without comment. No more need be said about its effect in
splitting Douglas from the South, as the "ooi^iracy^ charge in
the house divided speech was to drive him from his Republican

POTULAB SOVEHJ53GNTY: XBHE AND FAJLSE 353

admirers. Let us note principally 'that it attempted to convict
Douglas of "moral treason*' by Ms own definition, in so far as he
acknowledged an obligation to abide by the Dred Scott decision
when that decision had denied to the territorial legislature, as
to Congress, the power to exclude slavery from a territory.
Douglas, we assume our readers to know, said that it mattered
not how the Court decided the "abstract" question of territorial
legislative power, since slavery could not be established any-
where without affirmative legislation, which the territorial legis-
lature was under no obligation to pass. Whether Douglas was
factually correct i.e., whether it was true that positive protection
was a necessary precondition for the existence of slavery we will
not now inquire. For the moment we state Lincoln's moral objec-
tion to such a policy. Lincoln believed such a policy was morally
intolerable for a free people just because he believed that in a
free society kw must express the moral conviction of the people,
Douglas's policy amounted to a nullification of the Constitution
by destroying the value of a right that the Chief Justice said was
^expressly affirmed" in the Constitution. On this point Lincoln
was in agreement with the radical Southerners. As he said at
Cooper Union in the passage we have quoted in Chapter IX,
*If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws and constitutions against
it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept
away." 3 Lincoln beKeved that slavery was wrong and that its
wrong must be acknowledged if the nation's free institutions
were to be preserved and perpetuated. But Douglas's conception
of popular sovereignty not only denied that slavery was wrong,
but it struck at the root of all morality by denying that men
had an obligation to act upon what they themselves believed to
be right. In Ms answer, or refusal to answer the third ques-
tion, Douglas conceded that the Dred Scott decision was binding
by conceding that it did not constitute "moral treason'* and did
not violate the "known" meaning of the Constitution. He would
not deny that the Constitution "expressly affirmed" the right of
property in slaves ia the territories. Now was it not "moral
treason" to **accept" the proposition that the Constitution affirmed
such a right and yet to say that members of a territorial legislature
had no duty to secure a right so affirmed? For what purpose
did the Constitution eadst but to secure the rights it affirmed?
Lincoln pounded and pounded at this anomaly and insisted, what
we believe every candid person must admit, that there was no

354 E CASE FOR UNCOU3

qualitative difference between the right to hold and enjoy prop-
erty in slaves in the territories in the Constitution as expounded
by Taney and accepted by Douglas and the right to the rendition
of fugitive slaves in the states. If there was no obligation either
in Congress or in the territorial legislature to secure one "expressly
affirmed" right, then where was the duty to secure another? The
abolitionists were the only ones in the country who had seriously
denied Congress's duty to pass a fugitive slave law, and Doug-
las's Freeport Doctrine placed him, a fortiori, on the same ground.
Lincoln's last words in the joint debates are, "Why there is not
such an Abolitionist in the nation as Douglas, after all" 4

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle draws a distinction be-
tween the antithesis of virtue to vice and that of continence to
incontinence. These antitheses are similar yet differ significantly.
A virtuous man acts rightly because he knows what is right and
has conquered the passions which would prevent him from acting
rightly. Indeed, the sign of a virtuous character, according to
Aristotle, is not that its possessor does what is right but that
he enjoys doing it. A continent man resembles a virtuous man,
but his passions still resist the good or right action, and hence
he cannot act with pleasure. The difference between virtue and
continence may not always be perceptible to an observer, but
its inner significance is crucial. For the pleasure which accom-
panies virtuous action inevitably enhances the quality of the
action. Incontinence differs from vice in that the latter leads a
man to do the wrong thing deliberately. The vicious man enjoys
vice as the virtuous man enjoys virtue. The incontinent man,
however, does not act wrongly from intention but from weakness.
He knows what is right and wishes to do it, but his errant passions
are too strong for him. The words of Paul in the Letter to the
Romans, 7:15 and 19, describe his plight to perfection.

For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that I do
not; but what I hate, that I do.

And:

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which
I would not, that I do.

Superficially it would seem that, even as continence is a lesser
excellence than virtue, so incontinence is a lesser evil than vice.
The vicious man is malevolent on principle, the incontinent man

SOVEREIGNTY: TRUE AND FALSE 355

because he cannot help himself. And presumably, like Paul, the
incontinent man can be praised for his intention, if not his action,
while the vicious man can be blamed for both.

As a general statement the foregoing conclusion is substantially
correct Moral education is a process wherein refractory passions
are subjected to a discipline which must come, for the most part,
initially from the outside. Incontinence normally precedes con-
tinence in the chronology of such education. And so does
continence normally precede virtue. For the yoke of the moral
demands rests heavily for a long time for most of us before it is
carried lightly, if ever it is. The process of internalizing the
moral demands is threefold: first they must be accepted, then
obeyed, and only finally rejoiced in. Yet there are those whose
development, in whole or in part, is arrested. And of those who
remain incontinent it may be said that they are, in a fundamental
sense, worse than the vicious* For a person who does what is
wrong on principle i.e., believing that it is right might con-
ceivably reform if he were persuaded that what he is doing is
not right but wrong, "But to the incontinent man," says Aristotle,
"may be applied the proverb 'when water chokes, what is one
to wash it down with?* If he had been persuaded of the lightness
of what he does, he would have desisted when he was persuaded
to change his mind: but now he acts one way, in spite of having
been persuaded of the contrary."

Douglas's Freeport Doctrine was nothing less than a calculated
indoctrination in incontinence. In so far as it was not sheer
hypocrisy, it sanctioned the refusal to perform the most solemn
of recognized constitutional obligations. As such, it was subversive
of the entire process of moral education in the principles of free
republican government, Douglas's own Kansas-Nebraska Act had
said that the people of the territories were subject to the Consti-
tution in the exercise of their legislative powers. And fidelity
to the Constitution is the key to the only rational defense of
his entire career that is possible: that Constitution by virtue of
which, alone, he held, we existed as a nation. And yet, while
acknowledging the binding force of Taney's declaration that the
right of property in slaves had been expressly affirmed in the
Constitution, he advised the people of Kansas to ignore such a
right if they did not wish to admit slaveholders into their midst
We have quoted earlier from Douglas's 1850 speech, in which
he said that in free countries laws and ordinances am

356 THE CASE FOR IINCOLN

nullities unless sustained by hearts and intellects of the people.
But this was as true of the Constitution of the United States
as of any of the local laws made by, or in consequence of, its
authority. It was a mere quibble that he proposed nullifying a
constitutional right by non-action. For if one such right might
be nullified by local non-action, with no remedy from federal
courts or Congress, why might not another right be nullified by
positive action? The Freeport Doctrine had all the potentialities
for nullification and disunion that the teachings of Calhoun ex-
pressed without their intellectual and moral integrity. Lincoln
agreed, and rightly agreed, in this with the Jefferson Davis school
of thinking: the Union might, as a political entity, survive by
recognizing the nationality of slavery and the locality of freedom,
or by recognizing the locality of slavery and the nationality of
freedom. But it was impossible that it should recognize the
nationality of slavery and yet deny the legal consequences of
that recognition, or that it should recognize the nationality of
freedom and deny the consequences following from that To say
that the Constitution carried slavery into the national domain,
where it might be destroyed by men whose political rights were
derived solely from that selfsame Constitution, was an anomaly
in law and morals too gross to be tolerated. Lincoln's final sum-
mary of the meaning of the Freeport Doctrine came after the
debates, in his speech in Columbus, Ohio, September 16, 1859.
Its aphoristic perfection cannot be improved. When you clear
away all "the trash, the words, the collateral matter/' said Lincoln,
Douglas's Freeport Doctrine was reduced to this "bare absurdity**:

... a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it
has a lawful right to be. 5

Douglas was too intelligent a man and too sensitive to his own
loyalty to the Constitution to allow Lincoln an unchallenged ad-
vantage from this anomaly. His only real attempt at a reply came
after the joint debates in his Harper's essay of 1859 on ^Popular
Sovereignty in the Territories." As has been indicated in the
Preface, a full analysis of his argument therein would go beyond
the limits of this study. We only notice here that Douglas at-
tempted to maintain the position that the legislative power of
the territories was not derived from Congress but that; while
Congress had the power to establish a government for the
territories, the government in the territories derived its authority

POPULAB SOVEREIGNTY; TRUE AND FAJLSB 357

from the people in the territories. He likened the action of Con-
gress in establishing a legislature in the territories to its action
in establishing United States courts. Congress might establish
courts, but it might not itself act as a court, nor might it overrule
decisions of the courts (a proposition in itself highly question-
able). The courts, according to this thesis, derived their judicial
power from the inherent nature of judicial power, not from the
Congress which conferred the judicial power on them. And so
Congress had the right to confer legislative power on the terri-
tories but not to exercise it And the power of the territorial
legislature, although conferred on the territory by Congress, de-
rived from the inherent right of self-government of the people
there, which right Congress presumably only recognized when
it acted to a conf en**

For our present purposes we wiU merely note that this doctrine
vindicates Lincoln's attack in that it recognizes the moral im-
possibility of the position Douglas took during the debates. It at-
tempts to bottom the Freeport Doctrine on his conception of
popular sovereignty as a moral principle-although we have
already seen that this conception cannot bear inspection as a
moral principle. But, as constitutional doctrine, tie Harper's essay
will not stand up any better. Lincoln had pointed out during the
debates that the Kansas-Nebraska Act, like other territorial bills,
provided for a governor and courts appointed by the President
and that these shared the legislative authority of tikie territories as
much as the President and Supreme Court shared tibe legisla-
tive authority of the United States. Prior to the Kansas-Nebraska
Act territorial laws had been subject to nullification by Congress
as weU as veto by the governor* Douglas's bill had been more
"democratic** than its predessors; but not even Douglas had
breathed a suggestion in 1854 that the earlier territorial laws, in
subjecting the territories to such supervision by Congress, had
been unconstitutional or contrary to the principles of political
right No one had ever doubted before Douglas's Harper's essay
and probably no one but Douglas then that Congress had a law-
ful power to nullify or override territorial legislation, if it chose to
do w, whether or not the exercise of such power was expedient.

The right that Congress has, under the Constitution, to admit
new states has been conceded, then and since, to sanction the
exercise of all powers necessary and proper to prepare territories
to become new states* And "necessary and proper" has never been

358 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

interpreted other than liberally in this respect. Strict abstraction
of the Constitution, whatever may be said for it in other respects,
would be completely absurd here, for the simple reason that, by
a strict construction of the Constitution, the nation could never
have acquired the lands from which the new territories and states
were formed. 6 For two years Jefferson ruled the newly (and, by
his own view, unconstitutionally) acquired Louisiana Territory
despotically, although it had a Creole population approximating
that of some of the states and the treaty with France had
guaranteed them United States citizenship. And when Jefferson
grudgingly admitted local participation in the territorial govern-
ment, it was on a far more limited basis than the Kansas-Nebraska
Act (or, indeed, any intervening territorial acts) provided. But
perhaps more to the point is Douglas's own proposal in regard
to Utah in 1857. When the Mormon difficulties were at their
height, Douglas proposed as a possible solution that the territorial
law be revoked and the inhabitants of Utah be brought under
complete, direct federal control! In short, Douglas himself was
prepared to recall the grant of legislative power to the people of
a territory when they did not exercise it in a sufficiently responsi-
ble manner. As everyone knows, polygamy was at the bottom of
the Mormon troubles, and Douglas would have taken any and
all steps that might have been required to see that no state of
the Union would ever sanction that indubitably "domestic" institu-
tion. The Republican party, we should add, was dedicated from
its inception to the extinction of those "twin relics of barbarism,**
polygamy and slavery. And Douglas never defended the right of
the people anywhere to choose, if they would, the former of the
two.

The Constitution cannot then entrust to Congress such a task
as that of ensuring that new states be "republican'* m form mean*
ing practically thereby that they have institutions compatible with
harmonious membership in a union with the other states while
denying to Congress legislative power when and where the insti-
tutions of future states axe being formed. It may be doubted as
Jefferson doubted that the Constitution grants Congress power to
acquire new territory. Yet Douglas was tie most violently expan-
sionist national leader the country has ever seen, the last man
in the world to have suggested constitutional doubts of such a
kind. And Congress could not possibly fulfill its undoubted duty

3POPTOAR SOVEBEIGNTY: TRUE AOT FALSE 359

to prepare acquired lands for statehood if it did not have
legislative power in the territories. And this again could not be
true if the territorial legislature had other than a derivative, con-
ditional, legislative right. The Harper's essay only adds to the con-
fusion inherent in the Freeport Doctrine.

In presenting the case for Douglas we have represented him
as the enemy of Know-Notibingism and of all the snobbery
and class consciousness engendered by the hostility of the older
Anglo-Saxon stock for the new floods of immigrants. Yet Douglas,
in opposing Anglo-Saxon prejudices, did so by cultivating the
prejudices of the Irish, both for the British and for the Negro.
Lincoln, however, opposed all prejudices, so far as they under-
mined the "ancient faith 9 which he believed to be the necessary
condition of all political and moral well-being in a free popular
republic. In his Dred Scott speech, wherein Lincoln gave his
classic exposition of the meaning of the Declaration as the
standard maxim of a free society, he drew an inference from this
thesis which not only illustrated Ms point but also constituted a
challenge to the mistaken devotion of the Irish for Douglas:

I had thought the Declaration promised something better
than the condition of British subjects; but no, it meant only
that we should be equal to them in their own oppressed and
unequal condition. According to that, it gave no promise that
having kicked off the King and Lords of Great Britain, we
should not at once be saddled with a King and Lords of
our own. 7

Lincoln too could twist the lion's tail, but he did so only to assert
an obligation on Americans to achieve greater justice among
themselves, in consequence of their free principles, than was to
be found in any polity of the old world. Lincoln was absolutely
convinced, old-line Whig though he had been, that the only hope
of the new immigrants of being assimilated into American life
on terms of general equality was in and through the religious
cultivation of the universal creed of the Declaration. In his
Chicago speech of July 10, 1858, Lincoln sounded a theme which
echoed through the debates. He spoke of the annual celebration
of independence, as he always loved to do, in terms which suggest
nothing so much as the Feast of the Passover, celebrating the

THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

deliverance of the Hebrew people from Pharaohs Egypt, or of
Easter, celebrating the deliverance of the world from original sin.

We hold 'this annual celebration to remind ourselves of aE
the good done in this process of time, of how it was done
and who did it, and how we are historically connected with
it, and we go from these meetings in better humor with our-
selves-we feel more attached the one to the other, and more
firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we
are better men in the age, and race, and country in which
we live for these celebrations. But ... there is something
else connected with it We have besides these men-de-
scended by blood from our ancestors-among us perhaps half
our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they
are men who have come from Europe Gtennan, Irish,
French and Scandinavian men that have come from Europe
themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and have
settled here, finding 'themselves our equals in all things* If
they look back through this history to brace their connection
with those days by blood, they find they have none, they
cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and
make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they
look through that old Declaration of Independence they find
that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-
evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel
that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their
relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral
principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as
though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the fiesh
of the men who wrote 'that Declaration, and so they are.
This is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the
hearts of patriotic and libearty-loving men together, that will
link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists
in the minds of men throughout the world. 8

We may compare the foregoing with the following typical egres-
sion by Douglas in his opening speech at Ottawa:

I do not question Mr* Lincoln's consdentfous belief that
the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, but
for my own part, I do not regard the aegro as say equal* and
positively deny that he is my brother or any Ida to me what-
ever. 9

POPULAB SOVEREIGNTY: TRUE AHD FALSE 361

Such sallies, as may be gathered, caused much hilarity. But the
serious contrast is as weighty as anything in the joint debates,
Lincoln insisted, what every political philosopher has always
recognized, that there must be some conviction, usually embodied
in the form of a story that can be told, comprehended, and taken
to heart by all, which produces a sense of community and unites
the hearts of 'those who call themselves fellow citizens. Without
that fellow feeling there is no basis for mutual trust, and where
there is no trust there can be no freedom. For political self-
government involves governing and being governed, and where
there is insufficient trust, the idea of making others the trustees,
for however limited a time, of our dearest interests does not make
sense. And the only possible basis for the unity of a people as
heterogeneous in origin as the American people was one which
transcended their different origins. Such unity could not be found
in any revealed religious teaching, because they were as divided
in this respect as in any other, Lincoln did, however, in retelling
our history, cast it in a form which reflected the common elements
within the sectarian diversity, as we have seen in the Lyceum
speech. But the doctrinal basis of this patriotic history was the
universal statement in the Declaration, a statement which must
be understood as comprehending the Negro if it were to be
understood in a way which would unite white men.

No one who knows anything of the explosive hatreds involved
in the clash of Americans of different origins, in consequence of
the great tides of immigration before and after the Civil War,
can doubt that they contained vast possibilities for caste and
class oppressions, oppressions which might have rivaled if they
did not exceed those of the enslaved Negro. Indeed, the oppres-
sions that did exist in the later nineteenth century, in the slums
of the great cities, in the factories and in the mines, were bad
enough* Yet they have proved in large measure transient, and it
would be difficult to find any considerable group, unless it be the
American Indian, whose position, having once been depressed in
relation to other groups, has not been ameliorated. And no group
since the Civil War has been so hopelessly degraded as was the
Negro, slave and free, in the decades before the Civil War. If
this is true, it is so because, and only because, although class and
caste oppressions may have existed in fact, they have never
since been defended, or defensible, as a matter of fig/if, before

362 THE. CASE FOB IINCOLN

the American people as a whole. That the nation as a whole has
never been able to defend inequality as the South defended slav-
ery may be traced, so far as any great political effects can be
traced, to Lincoln's success in opposing Douglas as a leader of
"American political public opinion."

Chapter XVII

The Meaning of Equality: Abstract and
Practical

To THE foregoing argument there is, however, one massive
objection. In brief, this objection amounts to the charge that Lin-
coln never really believed in the principles of the Declaration of
Independence and that he never espoused them further than
suited his own personal and party purposes. The evidence for this
charge is that, although Lincoln insisted in tihe "abstract, 1 * that the
Negro undoubtedly had the same right as the white man to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he was no more willing than
Douglas to secure those rights; i.e., to accord to the Negro the
concrete means to their enjoyment. For it is indubitably true that,
from the first raising of the slavery-extension issue in 1854 by the
repeal of the Missouri Compromise, but never more emphatically
than in the joint debates, Lincoln pronounced himself against any
measure to bring about the political or social equality of the white
and black races. Because of tibds Lincoln's consistency, if not his
sincerity, has been widely questioned. And the view has been
spread that Lincoln adhered to the universalism of the Declara-
tion so long as, but only so long as, it kept pace with the interests
of the Republican party and with his interests as a Republican
leader. In this vein, and in line with revisionism's depreciation of
the debates, Professor Randall insists that in 1858 "big and
fundamental things about slavery and the Negro were not on the
agenda of national parties/* 1

The case against Lincoln, on the ground that he limited himself
to an "abstract** condemnation of slavery, a condemnation which

364 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

issued only in the condemnation of the extension of slavery, upon
which alone northern abolitionists and Negrophobes agreed, has
been stated with great sharpness in a brilliant essay on Lincoln
by Professor Richard Hofstadter in his The American Political
Tradition. 2 Hofstadter, it should be remarked, does not share
the political orientation of revisionism, which makes Douglas the
hero of the effort to avoid the "needless war." Yet his historiogra-
phy, apart from some highly personal interpretations, seems to be
based largely upon revisionism. We shall present some marked
instances of this. On the whole, Hofstadter's political sympathies
appear to lean toward abolitionism. Randall, Milton, Craven, and
others of their school blame Lincoln, with varying degrees of
acerbity, for insisting at all upon the universal meaning of the
Declaration and making the moral condemnation of slavery a po-
litical question. Hofstadter, however, approves of this but believes
that the same argument which condemned slavery should have
compelled Lincoln to condemn the political inequality which he
tolerated. His conclusion with respect to Lincoln, however, is
identical with that of revisionism: the pre-presidential Lincoln
was above all a demagogue who thought much of what was neces-
sary to get himself elected and little of the consequences to the
country of his being elected.

Professor Hofstadter describes with admirable clarity the prac-
tical political problem Lincoln faced and the formula with which
he solved it. Lincoln's campaigns reconciled the demands both of
abolitionists, for whom opposition to slavery was paramount, and
the demands of those who cared nothing that the Negro was
enslaved, so long as he was kept out of the territories, whether
as a freeman or a slave, where they and their children might
wish to go. Lincoln's trick, according to Hofstadter, was to invoke
the full moral weight of the Declaration of Independence for the
extremely limited demand of keeping slavery out of Kansas and
Nebraska (where Hofstadter, in common with the revisionists,
does not believe it would have gone anyway). According to
Hofstadter, Lincoln's success in enforcing this demand while rec-
onciling (practically, not logically) the divergent and conflicting
viewpoints of his followers "entitles him to a place among the
world's great political propagandists." Clearly, however, Hof-
stadter does not believe that Lincoln's success entitles hf to any
place at all among the world's great moralists.

THE MEANING OF EQUAUTY 365

Hofstadter's charge against the integrity of Lincoln's posi-
tion may best be gathered from the following passage of his
essay: **. . . [Lincoln's] strategy of appealing to abolitionists and
Negrophobes at once, involved him in embarrassing contradic-
tions. In Northern Illinois he spoke in one vein before abolition-
minded audiences, but farther south, where settlers of Southern
extraction were dominant, he spoke in another. It is instructive
to compare what he said about the Negro in Chicago with what
he said in Charleston.

Chicago, July 10, 1858:

Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the
other man, this race and that race and the other race being
inferior, and therefore must be placed in an inferior position.
Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people
throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up
declaring that all men are created equal.

Charleston, September 18, 1858:

I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor
of bringing about in any way the social and political equality
of the white and black races: that I am not, nor ever have
been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of
qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white
people . . .

And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain
together there must be the position of superior and inferior,
and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the
superior position assigned to the white race.

It is not easy to decide whether the true Lincoln is the one who
spoke in Chicago or the one who spoke in Charleston. Possibly
the man devoutly believed each of the utterances at the time he
delivered it; possibly his mind too was a house divided against
itself. In any case it is easy to see in all this the behavior of a
professional politician looking for votes."

That Lincoln was a professional politician and vote getter may
be freely granted, but the case for democracy, we believe, rests
upon the possibility that this occupation may be an honorable one.
Nay, more, we believe, with Woodrow Wilson, that the example
of Lincoln is of crucial significance in the evidence it supplies
concerning this possibility. Hofstadter would have us believe that

366 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

the evidence of the pre-presidential Lincoln, at least, is not evi-
dence to suggest the possibility of reconciling the demands of the
vocation of democratic politics with the demands of honor. The
passages presented above suggest, moreover, not only a funda-
mental inconsistency of view but a base adaptation of Lincoln's
professions to suit the prejudices of the immediate audience. Let
us turn first to this lesser charge, the charge of trimming.

Hof stadter has taken over the trimming charge ( as he indicates ) ,
as well as the inconsistency charge, from Douglas, who made them
in the Galesburg debate. Lincoln, in his reply to the trimming
charge which reply, however, Hofstadter omits to mention-
observed first of all:

When the Judge says . . . that I make speeches of one sort
for the people of the northern end of the state, and of a
different sort for the southern people, he assumes that I do
not understand that my speeches will be put in print and
read North and South. I knew all the while that the speech
that I made at Chicago and the one I made at Jonesboro
and the one at Charleston, would all be put in print and
all the reading and intelligent men in the community would
see them and know all about my opinions. 3

The foregoing is part of Lincoln's immediate response at Gales-
burg, but he added to it at Quincy after Douglas had again
pressed the attack:

Now I wish to show you, that . . . before I made the speech
at Charleston, which the Judge [and Professor Hofstadter]
quotes from, he had himself heard me say substantially the
same thing. It was in our first meeting, at Ottawa . . .
[where] I read an extract from an old speech of mine, made
nearly four years ago, not merely to show my sentiments, but
to show that my sentiments were long entertained and openly
expressed; in which extract I expressly declared that my own
feelings would not admit a social and political equality be-
tween the white and black races, and that even if my own
feelings would admit of it, I still knew that the public
sentiment of the country would not, and that such a thing
was an utter impossibility, or substantially that ... At the

THE MEANING OF EQUALITY 367

end of the quotation ... I made the comments . . . which
I will now read, and ask you to notice how very nearly they
are the same as Judge Douglas says were delivered by me
down in Egypt 4

We will not reproduce the entire extract here, since it will be
required a little later. But in the course of it Lincoln did say,
besides much more to the same effect, "I have no purpose to
introduce political and social equality between the white and
black races." After reading he continued:

I now make this comment: That speech from which I have
now read . . . was made way up north in the Abolition
district of this state par excellence in the Lovejoy district-
in the personal presence of Lovejoy It had been made and
put in print in that region only three days less than a month
before the speech at Charleston, the like of which Judge
Douglas thinks I would not make where there was any
Abolition element. 5

It seems to us that this is a full and complete refutation of at
least one half of the trimming charge, viz., that Lincoln trimmed
his "inegalitarianism" in the North. As to his trimming his egali-
tarianism to the southward, it is true that we do not find the
flaming invocations of the Declaration at Jonesboro, Alton, or
Charleston. But the campaign was spread over four months, dur-
ing which the candidates were continuously speaking, and it
would be difficult to pin down the trimming charge on the ground
that Lincoln did not say at these three places what he had said
dozens of times elsewhere and what the people in these southern
parts of the state must have known Lincoln had often said if they
knew anything about him at all. Paul Angle, in his introduction
to the new edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, says of the
campaign, "In two ways, it makes journalistic history. For the first
time correspondents traveled with the candidates, and for the first
time a series of political speeches was reported stenographically."
This would tend to substantiate Lincoln's assertion that he knew
his speeches would be read in all parts of the state. More pertinent,
however, is the fact that Lincoln's two great speeches preceding
the campaign, the Peoria speech of 1854 and the speech on the
Dred Scott decision in 1857, were both delivered in Springfield,
which belonged both geographically and politically to the south-
ern part of the state. Indeed, the Republicans never carried Lin-

368 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

coin's home county, either in 1858 or 1860. And both of these
speeches contain, in the most emphatic way, Lincoln's assertion
of the universalism of the Declaration, its inclusion of the Negro,
and its moral condemnation of slavery. And both also contain
denials on Lincoln's part, as he said in the Dred Scott speech,
of "that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not
want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for
a wife."

Let us say in concluding our discussion on this picayune but
troublesome point that we would be surprised if anyone could
find any political speeches in which the speaker did not make
some adaptations to the known prejudices of his audience. And
we are certain that this was true of both Lincoln and Douglas.
Lincoln's rhetorical maxim was ever "that a drop of honey catches
more flies than a gallon of gall." But it is one thing to approach
an audience by emphasizing the points the speaker has in common
with it and another to misrepresent his position to it. There is
no evidence that Lincoln deliberately suppressed anything in the
South that he had said in the North and positive evidence that he
did not suppress in the North what he had said in the South.
The imputation of baseness in Douglas's charge may be put
down as campaign oratory. One cannot say as much of Professor
Hofstadter's repetition of the charge and his failure to report Lin-
coln's answer to it

The one time in the joint debates when Lincoln may have lost
his temper was at Jonesboro. The Douglas newspapers, quoting
the senator, had circulated the charge that Lincoln had been so
overcome at Ottawa that he had had to be carried from the plat-
form. Lincoln had been carried on the shoulders of some of his
enthusiastic admirers, but Douglas insisted that he had to be
carried. After some pretty strong and highly personal language
Lincoln remarked, "But really I have talked about this matter
perhaps longer that I ought, for it is no great thing, and yet the
smallest things are often the most difficult to deal with." And so
it is with this foolish trimming charge which has stuck through a
century, although Lincoln gave the lie to the most important part
of it at Quincy, if not at Galesburg. But although the trimming
charge cannot stand on its own feet, it has in all likelihood been
believed by many because they have accepted the truth of the
inconsistency charge, and this is a most serious matter. In what,

THE MEANING OF EQUALITY 369

precisely, Lincoln's inconsistency is alleged to have lain is con-
cisely summarized in a note appended by Hofstadter to the pas-
sage from his essay reproduced above. It runs as follows:

Lincoln was fond of asserting that the Declaration of
Independence, when it said that all men are created equal,
included the Negro. He believed the Negro was probably
inferior to the white man, he kept repeating, but in his right
to eat, without anyone's leave, the bread he earned by his
own labor, the Negro was the equal of any white man. Still
he was opposed to citizenship for the Negro. How any man
could be expected to defend his right to enjoy the fruits of
his labor without having the power to defend it through his
vote, Lincoln did not say. In his Peoria speech he had himself
said: "No man is good enough to govern another man, without
that man's consent." In one of his magnificent private memo-
randa on slavery Lincoln argued that anyone who defends
the moral right of slavery creates an ethic by which his own
enslavement may be justified. But the same reasoning applies
to anyone who would deny the Negro citizenship. It is im-
possible to avoid the conclusion that so far as the Negro was
concerned, Lincoln could not escape the moral insensitivity
that is characteristic of the average white American.

In entering this particular inquiry it would be well to remind
ourselves of Sir Winston Churchill's definition of political consist-
ency, which was given in an earlier chapter. 6 Mere verbal
consistency is no criterion of genuine consistency in politics. In
fact, genuine verbal inconsistency may be a requirement of true
political consistency. We have applied tests based upon such prem-
ises to Douglas's policies and have seen a very large measure of
political consistency in all he said and did. If Douglas's policies
were wrong, it was certainly not because they were inconsistent;
it was because they were based upon a consistent refusal to ac-
cept the consequences of the true meaning of "all men are created
equal." Fidelity to a cause, rather than to a stock formula of
words, is what we have a right to demand of a statesman. Dif-
ferent words may advance the same cause in different circum-
stances, and sometimes words of contrary bearing must be used
at the same time to advance that cause in given circumstances.
A statesman has only a limited control of the conditions within
which he must act. If, within the limits of his control, he acts

370 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

inconsistently with the ends of true policy, he is justly to be
blamed. If, however, he professes no intention to alter those con-
ditions which are beyond his control, even though the goal with
which we identify him would make it appear desirable to alter
them, then no sane man will denounce him. The problem of ap-
plying the moral judgment of history to a statesman requires,
therefore, a fourfold criterion: first, is the goal a worthy one;
second, does the statesman judge wisely as to what is and what
is not within his power; third, are the means selected apt to pro-
duce the intended results; and fourth, in "inconsistently" denying
any intention to do those things which he could not in any case
do, does he say or do anything to hinder future statesmen from
more perfectly attaining his goal when altered conditions bring
more of that goal within the range of possibility? On all these
counts we believe it can be demonstrated that Lincoln spoke and
acted with perfect consistency.

How conscious Lincoln was of this problem we have already
seen when Lincoln answered the argument of Douglas and
Taney that the Fathers and Signers could not have included the
Negro in "all men are created equal" and then have continued
to hold slaves themselves or represent slaveholding communities.
The men who secured our independence and founded the gov-
ernment, said Lincoln, certainly believed all men had certain un-
alienable rights. But if they had attempted to secure all the rights
of all men they would have ended in no rights secured for any
men. The truth of the proposition, or the sincerity of their inten-
tion, was in no wise impugned by the moderation of their actions.
In the same Chicago speech of July 10, 1858, from which Hof-
stadter (following Douglas) has quoted, Lincoln also spoke as
follows:

. . . there are certain conditions that make necessities and
impose them upon us, and to the extent that a necessity is
imposed upon a man he must submit to it. I think that was
the condition in which we found ourselves when we estab-
lished this government. We had slavery among us, we could
not get our constitution unless we permitted them to remain
in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if
we grasped for more, and having by necessity submitted to
that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter
of our liberties. 7

THE MEANING OF EQUALITY 37!

Thus Lincoln understood the task of statesmanship as we have
described it: to know what is good or right, to know how much
of that good is attainable, and to act to secure that much good
but not to abandon the attainable good by grasping for more. Now
Lincoln's task from 1854 on, as he saw it, was to place slavery
where it would be in course of ultimate extinction. This, he was
convinced, could be done by arresting the spread of slavery, by
confining slavery within its existing limits. A necessary condition
of such an achievement was to restore the Missouri Compromise
slavery restriction. Lincoln undoubtedly would have done more;
e.g., he would have revived the Wilmot Proviso limitation if that
were feasible. Evidence of this may be found in the law the Re-
publicans passed outlawing slavery in all the territories in 1862.
To this law we will return later. But Lincoln's policy was not only
to concentrate upon the possible but to proceed a step at a time.
Indeed, only by such caution could he discover how much weight
the ground he was on would bear. For one must not forget the
reverse of the policy just stated: Lincoln believed, revisionists to
the contrary notwithstanding, not only that slavery might be
placed in course of ultimate extinction but that if it was not so
placed it might become national, lawful in all the states, North
as well as South, old as well as new. In other words, the issue, as
Lincoln saw it, was not merely whether slavery would be per-
petuated within its existing boundaries but whether slavery or
freedom would be placed in course of ultimate extinction. That
is the meaning of the house divided speech. The fate of the anti-
slavery coalition, a coalition made up, as he also said in the house
divided speech, "of strange, discordant, and even, hostile ele-
ments," depended, in his judgment, on the success of his personal
leadership. For he believed that the eastern leaders who thought
they could coalesce with Douglas after Lecompton were pro-
foundly mistaken. Thus Lincoln was convinced in 1858, as in 1863,
that upon the success of the policy for which he stood, and with
which he was identified, the question would be decided of
whether free, popular government was to survive. With such a
sense of almost more-than-human responsibility Lincoln would not
risk the good he believed he could secure by grasping at more.
Hofstadter does not deny that Lincoln's policy in 1858 was well
iesigned to accomplish what it was avowedly designed to accom-
plish; namely, the exclusion of slavery from the territories by the
creating of a major party possessing the political means to enforce

372 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

such a policy. Nor does he question the proposition that the state
of opinion in the country was such that, had Lincoln announced
any intention to do more to secure the rights of the Negro than
to place the Negro's captivity "in course of ultimate extinction,"
in the foregoing sense, Lincoln would have ruined his cause along
with himself. Lincoln said over and again that he believed opinion
was well-nigh universal in the country against any more equality
for the Negro than that implied in a policy of turning slavery
back on its existing legal rights in the slave states. How true Lin-
coln believed this to be we may further gather from two letters
he wrote to Chase in June 1859. Chase was more of a radical
than Lincoln and was particularly conspicuous for his opposition
to the fugitive slave law of 1850. Lincoln had read that the Re-
publican State Convention of Ohio had adopted as a plank in
its platform the proposal to "repeal . . . the atrocious Fugitive
Slave Law." And Lincoln concluded his first letter as follows:

I enter upon no argument one way or another; but I assure
you the cause of Republicanism is hopeless in Illinois, if it
can be in any way made responsible for that plank.

And again, at the conclusion of the second letter, he wrote:

My only object was to impress you with what I believe
is true, that the introduction of a proposition for the repeal
of the Fugitive Slave law, into the next Republican National
Convention, will explode the Convention and the party. 8

Professor Hofstadter has given Lincoln full credit for political
astuteness, and we do not think he disputes the accuracy of the
judgment expressed above. But how much more true would it
have been of any wildly visionary scheme ( as it would then have
appeared) for full Negro citizenship? The only hypothesis upon
which such a proposal would not have "exploded" the party would
be that the proposer would have been quietly confined as a luna-
tic. But he assuredly could not have led the Republican party in
Illinois in the year 1858. To conclude this portion of the argu-
ment we would address a question to anyone who, like Professor
Hofstadter, believes that Lincoln should have demanded the vote
for Negroes in 1858, at the same time that he demanded the
enforcement of a policy looking to the end of their enslavement.
Was it more important to lead to victory the anti-slavery party
which then existed, and existed on a very tenuous foundation, or

THE MEANING OF EQUALITY 373

to proclaim a policy of full interracial equality, a proclamation
that would have wrecked that party, leaving a pro-slavery party
in control of the national government? We concede that such a
counsel of "perfection" may be demanded in the name of morality.
And it may be that obedience to such counsels gain a man the
kingdom of heaven. But we believe it is as demonstrable as any-
thing in politics can be that, had Lincoln acted upon it, he would
have acted to perpetuate the hell of slavery on earth.

Hofstadter has said, 'It is impossible to avoid the conclusion
that so far as the Negro was concerned, Lincoln could not escape
the moral insensitivity that is characteristic of the average white
American." We may doubt that that man was insensitive to the
claims of the Negro's humanity who could write to his most inti-
mate friend that the sight of slaves "was a continued torment to
me," and, "It is hardly fair for you to assume, that I have no
interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power
of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much
the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings,
in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the
Union." 9 We do not believe anyone with moral sensitivity can
read through the body of Lincoln's speeches on the slavery ques-
tion without becoming aware of the intensity of the passions he
suppressed, as well as those to which he gave vent. We do not
believe anyone who is conscious of the larger meaning of states-
manship to Lincoln can fail to be aware how real was the
crucifixion which he believed had to be suffered for the sake of
political salvation. We do not believe anyone with moral sensi-
tivity could say of this man that he was "never much troubled
about the Negro . . ."

Hofstadter's accusation that Lincoln showed the "moral insensi-
tivity . . . of the average white American" is suggestive of Gunnar
Myrdal's massive work, An American Dilemma, the subtitle of
which is The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. 10 In his
preface Myrdal writes as follows:

The "American Dilemma," referred to in the title of this
book, is the ever-raging conflict between, on the one hand,
the valuations preserved on the general plane which we shall
call the "American Creed," where the American thinks, talks,
and acts under the influence of high national and Christian

374 THE CASE FOR

precepts, and, on the other hand, the valuations on the
specific plane of individual and group living, where personal
and local interests . . , jealousies; considerations of prestige
and conformity; group prejudice . . . dominate his outlook.

But the American dilemma, that "ever-raging conflict," is, in
Myrdal's formulation, a moral dilemma, a dilemma arising from
the sensitivity of the average American to the demands of the
American creed, a sensitivity which rebels against the demands
of his prejudices, even as his prejudices rebel against the demands
of his creed. That such a conflict has characterized the moral life
of the American people we fully concede. But we insist, with
Myrdal, against Hofstadter, that such a struggle is as much
indicative of sensitivity as of insensitivity. And we deny that the
peculiarly American tension, arising from recognition of the de-
mands of equality on the one hand and the practical denial of
some of those demands on the other, is in any just sense a morbid
condition. It is, on the contrary, the typical condition in which
political justice must be sought

It is generally conceded that the Declaration of Independence
is an authoritative expression of the American creed. But it has
escaped the attention of Myrdal and of many others that the
dilemma which he has celebrated is nof, as he has thought, be-
tween general and specific valuations, between precept and
practice, between ideal and reality. The American dilemma is
embodied in the Declaration of Independence itself. If the
dilemma exists at all, it is in the structure of the ideal, which
issues in a dual imperative. For the Declaration of Independence
does indeed say that all men are created equal. But by reason
of this very equality governments are said to derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed. Now the meaning of
the expression "consent of the governed" is open to much inter-
pretation. However, if the consent of the governed may rightfully
be withdrawn from any government which the people do not be-
lieve secures their unalienable rights in a satisfactory manner, we
believe that the consent of the governed cannot be interpreted
in a merely hypothetical sense; it cannot be merely passive; it
must embody the opinion of the governed. There is no question,
at any rate, that for Lincoln, no less than for Professor Hofstadter,
a government which did not, in the manner of a representative
democracy, embody popular opinion was not a legitimate govern-

THE MEANING OF EQUALITY 375

ment. Indeed, in Lincoln's Peoria speech of 1854 (first delivered
in Springfield in "southern" Illinois) he made his most radically
democratic statement of his pre-presidential career. After saying,
as we have seen above, that the principle that no man is good
enough to govern another without that other's consent is the sheet
anchor of American republicanism, he went on to declare, "Allow
ALL the governed an equal voice in the government, and that,
and that only, is self-government." 11 From this it is clear that
Lincoln at least held no medieval notions of "passive" consent.
Consent meant for him, as for any Jeffersonian Democrat, active
participation, an "equal voice in the government." For our pur-
poses, then, consent of the governed must mean the opinion of
those who have an equal voice in the government, a voice to
which all the governed are entitled.

Now the opinion of the governed, unfortunately for the Utopians
of this world, does not always favor the full and unequivocal rec-
ognition of that very equality which, alas, constitutes the title
deeds of its own authority. Nay, more, the opinion of the
governed may deny that all men are created equal. The crisis of
the house divided had arisen because a very considerable portion
of the American people had turned its back on the truth upon
which its own rights depended. Lincoln exhorted them again
and again to turn back into the right and true path. He firmly
believed that the explicit renunciation of the central tenet of hu-
man equality created a revolutionary situation: without such rec-
ognition, without this "sheet anchor," the ship of state was adrift,
and there was no security for any of the rights for which govern-
ments are instituted. For Lincoln the recognition of the "abstract"
truth was not barren of practical consequences just because it
was abstract. On the contrary, it was a necessary condition of
every political good. Professor Randall says that Lincoln "cited
Clay as showing that equality was abstract; you could not apply
it." 12 This is erroneous. Lincoln said that, according to Clay, the
equality proposition in the Declaration "is true as an abstract
principle . . . but ... we cannot practically apply it in all
cases." 18 For Lincoln the equality principle meant that slavery
should if possible be excluded from the foundations of any so-
ciety; but it also meant that it should guide legislators in any
existing society, teaching them to produce equal security for the
rights of all the governed to as great a degree as conditions would
permit. This was Lincoln's doctrine of the "standard maxim," to

37$ THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

which we have sufficiently adverted. But supreme among the con-
ditions which must limit the wise legislator's actions in a free so-
ciety is the opinion of the governed, to which he is duty bound
by the principle of equality itself.

If the only thing that counted, the only thing that created
obligation for the statesman, was the goal of equality of condition
i.e., equality of security for the unalienable rights of man then
the idea of popular government would be an absurdity. To see
that each man received his "equal" measure we would have to
have philosopher-kings, endowed with absolute power, to decree
and enforce what metaphysicians alone would know how to ex-
pound. But if, for good and sufficient reasons, we will not risk
the only condition upon which absolute justice seems attainable,
then we must be prepared to accept that lesser form of justice
which tempers the demand for equality with the demand for con-
sent. Political justice, as a compound of equality and consent, re-
quires deference to opinions which deny manij of the implications
of "abstract" equality, just as it required the repudiation of
opinions which deny any of the implications of such equality.

In the Peoria speech, in a passage he was to read to his audience
in the first debate at Ottawa four years later, Lincoln said:

What next? Free them, and make them politically and so-
cially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this;
and if mine would, we well know that those of the great
mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords
with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question,
if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether
well or ill founded, can not be safely disregarded.

And later in the same speech he also said:

. . . the Judge has no very vivid impression that the Negro
is a human; and consequently has no idea that there can be
any moral question in legislating about him. In his view, the
question of whether a new country shall be slave or free, is
a matter of as utter indifference, as it is whether his neighbor
shall plant his farm with tobacco, or stock it with horned
cattle. Now whether this view is right or wrong, it is very
certain that the great mass of mankind take a totally different
view. They consider slavery a great moral wrong; and their
feeling against it, is not evanescent, but eternal. It lies at the

THE MEANING OF EQUALITY 377

very foundation of their sense of justice; and it cannot be
trifled with. It is a great and durable element of popular
action, and I think, no statesman can safely disregard it 14

In these two passages we can see the twin poles which constituted
the axis upon which Lincoln's conception of political justice
rotated. Lincoln was equally dedicated to the principle of equality
and the principle of consent. Statesmanship, for him, consisted
in finding that common denominator in existing circumstances
which was the highest degree of equality for which general con-
sent could be obtained. To insist upon more equality than men
would consent to have would require turning to force or to the
arbitrary rule of the few. But to turn to oligarchy, as a means
of enforcing equality, would itself involve a repudiation of
equality in the sense of the Declaration. Precisely because all men
are created equal, we have an equal duty to work for equality
and to seek consent. Lincoln did not believe he had a moral
right to deprecate the opinion of his countrymen which denied
political equality to Negroes. To have done so would have meant
denying the right of white men to judge the conditions under
which their government could best secure their rights. But the
Declaration of Independence asserts that the people have an
indefeasible right to judge of the security of their rights, and Lin-
coln could not deny the legitimacy of their judgment concerning
the status to be accorded the Negro without denying that right.
Lincoln's middle ground, between equality and consent, which is
actually the middle ground between the two aspects of equality,
is the only thoroughly consistent ground which the principles of
the Declaration sanction. Lincoln never ceased to summon the
people to fidelity to the principle of equality, considered as the
principle of abstract justice. He would not abandon equality, as
Douglas had done, when equality proved unpopular or inconven-
ient. But neither would he abandon equality's other face, re-
flected in the opinion of the governed who made up the political
community of the United States. Because of the requirement of
consent, Lincoln felt a duty to adjust public policy to the moral
sense of the community. In the tension between equality and con-
sent, in the necessity to cling to both and abandon neither, but
to find the zone between which advances the public good, is the
creative task of the statesman. For this task there is no formula;
for the wise statesman there is no substitute.

378 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

The meaning of the Declaration, and the rights which Negroes
might justly claim in consequence of its principles, has been
greatly misunderstood. Hofstadter approves highly of Lincoln's
anti-slavery argument, by which, in his words, "anyone who de-
fends the moral right of slavery creates an ethic by which his own
enslavement may be justified." "But," Hofstadter continues, "the
same reasoning applies to anyone who would deny the Negro
citizenship." This, however, is not correct. Slavery involves the
denial of an "unalienable right," the right to liberty, which all
men have, according to the Declaration, by the laws of nature
and of nature's God. But the privileges of citizenship are not
unalienable natural rights but civil rights, to be determined by
a civil process. In that civil process the opinions of the members
who constitute each civil society may rightfully legislate the terms
and conditions by which those who are not members may be per-
mitted to enjoy the advantages of this society.

Let us remind ourselves of the conception of the origin of civil
society implicit in the Declaration. Men who are originally equal
no one having more authority over another than the other has
over him join together in order better to secure the rights that
each has in virtue of his humanity but which he cannot enjoy
except in and through association with his fellows. The authority
which arises from their so combining rests upon unanimity, in
that no man who does not consent to join is a member, nor is
any man who is not accepted a member. Those who form a civil
society do so for their better security, and no man is obliged
to join who does not feel that his joining makes him more secure,
and no man need be accepted whose joining does not make the
others feel more secure. Whoever does not join a civil society, at
its founding, has no claim to the advantages of a citizen, nor does
the civil society founded have a right to impose upon him the
obligations of a citizen. This does not mean that citizens and non-
citizens may treat each other unjustly. A non-citizen who benefits
a country that is not his own e.g., a Lafayette deserves that
country's gratitude. And a non-citizen who enjoys the protection
of the laws of a country not his own incurs obligations in pro-
portion to the benefits he enjoys. Still the duty not to injure others
and to repay benefits, etc., are duties which men have toward
each other irrespective of the bond of civil society. They exist
in the state of nature, and the obligations of non-members of a
given civil society to members is the same as it was before the

THE MEANING OF EQUALITY 379

formation of the civil society in question. Now, however, although
unanimity establishes civil society, it cannot continue to be the
basis of decision. Legislation must be by majority rule, because
it is the nearest practicable approximation to unanimity and dero-
gates least from the natural equality from which the civil society
took its origin. The majority then proceeds to establish such rules
and regulations for the conduct of society as in its judgment shall
add most to the security (and hence enjoyment) of those rights,
for the sake of which the society was formed. In making such
rules the opinion of the majority counts as the opinion of the
whole. This, of course, is a fiction; but it is a believable fiction
so long as, but only so long as, the minority feels that, whether
mistakenly or not, the majority is legislating with a view to secur-
ing the minority's rights as well as its own. If the minority feels
that its rights are more endangered than secured by the legisla-
tion of the majority, then it may, if it can, withdraw its allegiance.
This consciousness of the right of revolution, a right by which
the minority can endanger the majority, if the majority endangers
it, is one of the forces which tends to keep the majority "honest";
i.e., to assure that it will make a reasonable effort to think of the
minority's interests along with its own.

Now among the rules which each society may justly make for
its better preservation are rules dealing with non-members and
rules for admitting non-members to membership. And it is clear
that Negro slaves were not members of the civil society estab-
lished in 1776 or of the one perfected in 1787. Some few free
Negroes were members, and the opinion of Taney in the Dred
Scott case was utterly wrong, in assuming that Negroes could
not become citizens. They certainly could become citizens if and
when any state within which they were residing chose to make
them such. But while their enslavement may have been intrinsi-
cally unjust, there was nothing intrinsically unjust in denying
them the status of citizens after their emancipation. Admission
to the status of citizen is always something for the legislative
power in civil society to determine, from the point of view of the
advantages of that civil society. There is a certain anomaly in
the position of the freed Negro before the Civil War in that he
was neither a citizen (in most states) nor an alien. But from
the point of view of the principles of the Declaration his status
more nearly resembled that of an alien than a citizen. In any
case, he was certainly a non-member. The principles of the

380 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

Declaration do not require that any one who chooses to reside
in a land where he is not a member of the polity has a right to a
share in the government of that polity merely because he is subject
to its laws. The proposition that all the governed have a right
to an equal voice in the government applies only to those who
are members of the civil society. Any other assumption would
make nonsense of the conception of civil society as an association
for better securing unalienable rights. If foreigners could vote
in our elections, without any previous inquiry on our part as to
their character and opinions, our enemies could overcome us by
sending over an army not to fight but to vote! Whether rightly
or wrongly, the overwhelming opinion of white Americans before
the Civil War was that Negroes were not fit to exercise the
privileges of citizenship and that to admit them would have been
subversive of the purpose for which the government was insti-
tuted. It was Lincoln's opinion, as it was Jefferson's, that the only
natural right which the Negro possessed which required civil
recognition, beyond emancipation, was the right to emigrate.
The right to emigrate was a corollary of the right to liberty. If a
man is not admitted to the full privileges of a society of which
he is not a constituent member, or a successor of a constituent
member, he is denied no natural right. But he must be permitted
to form a society of his own if he so chooses or go where he thinks
he can better secure his own rights. He may not justly be de-
prived both of membership in the polity, to the laws of which
he is subject, and of the possibility of forming a polity in which
he will have full membership.

Professor Hofstadter's comparison of the right to citizenship
with the right to liberty fails completely as a criticism of Lincoln,
who understood the logical and moral implications of the Declara-
tion of Independence as well as, if not better than, any man
who has attempted to live by that noble testament. However,
Hofstadter's argument would be true today in a sense in which
it was not true in 1858. That is, anyone who now attempted to
justify depriving Negroes of the privileges of citizenship would
set a precedent which might be used against himself. The reason
for this is that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution
declares that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States,
and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United
States and of the state wherein they reside." Since 1868 the Negro
populations of the United States as a whole have enjoyed the

1HE MEANING OF EQUALITY 381

status of citizens of the United States and of the state wherein
they reside. The same amendment, as is, we trust, sufficiently
well known, also affirms that "No State shall make or enforce
any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of
citizens of the United States . . , nor deny to any person within
its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The recognition
of the Negro's claim to the privileges of citizenship, by the most
solemn legislative process known to the Constitution, the amend-
ing process, has created a moral claim to political equality which
the Negro could not claim by the principles of the Declaration of
Independence alone. That Abraham Lincoln contributed might-
ily to this enhancement of the worldly fortunes of the Negro in
America, and to that transformation of public opinion which made
it possible, we will not attempt to demonstrate. But we do believe
it is demonstrable. And we also believe that the still unfulfilled
achievement of equal political rights for Negroes would not even
be imaginable if there had not first been that recognition of the
Negro's humanity that the Declaration of Independence demands.
But Lincoln could not have been successful in securing the recog-
nition of the rights which the Declaration does demand if he
had pretended to assert in their behalf rights which it does not
demand.

A wisely consistent statesman, we have maintained, will not
do or say anything to hinder future statesmen from more per-
fectly attaining the ends which he recognizes as desirable but not
presently possible. Let us now inquire whether Lincoln, in deny-
ing any intention in 1858 to make citizens of Negroes, did or said
anything that might have served as a precedent for denying
them this consummation in the future. What Lincoln believed, or
did not believe, concerning racial equality and inequality has been
the subject of more loose and uncritical scholarship than almost
anything concerning his career before 1860. For example, T. Harry
Williams, in his introduction to the recent Rinehart edition of
Lincoln's selected writings, says, "Like perhaps ninety-nine per
cent of the American people in the nineteenth century, when
little attention was given to cultural anthropology or the study
of race, he was firmly convinced that the colored race was inferior
to the white. He did not think that whites and Negroes could
live together without one race, the superior whites, seeking to
oppress the other." But Professor Williams does not say in what

THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

Lincoln held the Negro to be inferior, nor whether Lincoln held
that the respects in which the Negro was inferior constituted
reasons for keeping him permanently in the position of a political
inferior. And in saying that Lincoln held that the whites would
always oppress the Negroes, does he understand this to be a
prediction of continued intolerance or an inference from the
Negro's inferiority? Let us turn to Lincoln's key statements on
this delicate subject.

In so doing, we must first remind ourselves what an extremely
delicate subject it was. We must remember that it was Douglas's
strategy, in all his long struggle with Lincoln, to fasten the charge
of racial egalitarianism upon Lincoln. As Lincoln tried to convict
Douglas of being really pro-slavery, so Douglas tried to convict
Lincoln of being really an abolitionist and a complete racial
integrationist. Lincoln could not have survived politically had
there been any widespread suspicion of truth in Douglas's charge.
In evaluating the meaning of Lincoln's denials of racial egalitar-
ianism, we must keep in mind the tremendous pressure he was
under to deny it and the fact that, as Professor Williams indicates,
perhaps 99 per cent of his followers were firmly convinced that
the Negroes were so far inferior as to be incapable of exercising
the privileges of citizenship in a manner compatible with the
public safety and welfare. We would say that opinion in Illinois
in 1858 was probably about as favorable to Negro citizenship as
opinion in Arkansas today is favorable to public school integration.
And we would ask the reader of the following selections to ponder
whether any politician of that state or sister states would today
be capable of such a restrained indulgence of the opinions of
those whose suffrages he was seeking.

We have already produced the classic passage from the Peoria
speech in which Lincoln said that his own feelings would not
admit of making the Negroes social and political equals or, "if
mine would, we well know that the great mass of white people
would not." After repeating this passage at Ottawa he went on
to say, among other things:

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality
between the white and black races. There is a physical
difference between the two, which in my judgment will
probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing
of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity

THE MEANING OF EQUAIJTY 383

that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas,
am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the
superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary,
but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason
in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural
rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold
that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I
agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many re-
spectscertainly not in color, perhaps not in moral and
intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread,
without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns,
he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the
equal of every living man. 15

This passage is repeated, with minor differences in wording, at
Charleston, where Lincoln had also said, as we have seen above,
"I am not, nor ever have been," in favor of making voters or
jurors of Negroes or otherwise permitting them social and political
equality.

What are we to infer from the foregoing concerning Lincoln's
views? In the first place, we must note that Lincoln, in saying,
"I am not, nor ever have been," says nothing about the future.
Lincoln never said, so far as we know, that he never would be in
favor of such equality. In the Peoria speech he said his own
feelings were against it, but he immediately introduced, as a
hypothetical possibility, that his own feelings might not be against
it. Why? The sentence, taken as a whole, is an equivocation.
Concerning the equality or inequality of the qualities of the
Negro, we note that Lincoln says "certainly" only that the Negro
is not his equal in color. Lincoln knew, of course, that his audience
would assign great value to this inequality. But what value did
he assign to it? We do not know. 16 As to moral and intellectual
endowment, he says "perhaps" the Negro is unequal in these re-
spects. If we credit Lincoln with the opinion which is implicit in
his whole life's work, then he believed that moral and intellectual
differences were the only qualitative differences between men
of intrinsic importance. On this premise Lincoln never, to our
knowledge, said that the Negro was certainly inferior in capacity
to the white man. In saying "perhaps," Lincoln was merely echo-
ing the opinion of Jefferson, and of all enlightened Americans,

384 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

who recognized that, in the barbaric condition of native Africans
and in the oppressed condition of American Negroes, there had
not been sufficient opportunity to form a conclusive judgment as
to their potentialities. 17 We give it as our opinion that, in the
actual circumstances, cultural anthropology could not have given
a more intelligent answer.

Lincoln was a pessimist on the subject of the possibility of an
interracial, egalitarian society. The physical difference of color, he
thought, preserved prejudices which would make political equal-
ity impossible. But he did not say that the inequality traceable
to color was rooted in an inequality of intrinsic worth. Nor did
he ever say, as Professor Williams believes, that the "superior
whites" would always oppress the inferior Negroes. Lincoln gave
it as his opinion that one or the other would do the oppressing.
And, he said, if there must be a superior and an inferior, an
oppressed and an oppressor, he would naturally prefer the
advantage being on the side of "the race to which I belong." This
reasoning has nothing whatever to do with justice. It contem-
plates the situation in the ancient conundrum in which there are
two men on a raft capable of supporting only one. It is equally
just, or unjust, for either to push the other off. What this proves
is that there are certain situations in which justice is impossible.
Where justice is impossible, the decision between two equally
unjust alternatives may justly be decided on the basis of pure
self-interest. But because there are some situations in which
justice is impossible does not mean that it is never possible or
that there is any less obligation to be just when justice is possible.

In the background of Lincoln's pessimism on the race question,
as in the foreground of every appeal to natural right, are the
classic reflections of Jefferson. In the Notes on Virginia Jefferson
had written, "Among the Romans emancipation required but one
effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without stain-
ing the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary,
unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond
the reach of mixture." 18 When Jefferson asked himself, "Why not
retain and incorporate the blacks into the State," his answer was:
"Deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand
recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained;
new provocations; the real distinction which nature has made;
and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and
produce convulsions, which will never end but in the extermina-

THE MEANING OF EQUAIXTY 385

tion of die one or the other race." 19 The premise of this assertion,
be it noted, is not a doctrine of white supremacy. On the contrary,
Jefferson must have entertained the possibility that the blacks
had very considerable political capacity if he believed it possible
that they might become oppressors in their turn. He supposes
that Negroes and whites alike are given to prejudice because
such is the nature of their common humanity and when the roots
of the prejudice go as deep as in this instance, the obstacles to
complete equality of condition in the same society are insupera-
ble. Both Lincoln and Jefferson, we are certain, would have con-
ceded that such prejudices are theoretically capable of being
transcended. Nay, more, we are certain that neither of them held
an opinion on the race question which might justly be called a
prejudice. "But a nation of philosophers is as little to be expected
as the philosophical race of kings wished for by Plato/' 20 Both
Lincoln and Jefferson, being committed to government by the
consent of the governed, were committed to the proposition that
unphilosophic opinion must always enter into title actual basis
of political justice. In the Temperance Address Lincoln had
foreseen, with a clarity given to few men, the possibility of
tyranny implicit in the demand that men be governed by reason
alone. No man who was himself governed by reason would at-
tempt to enforce such demands.

Neither Lincoln nor Jefferson believed that genuine friendship
between the races that is, apart from exceptional individuals-
was possible. And neither believed that, where friendship is
impossible, it is possible for men to be fellow citizens in any but a
partial or incomplete sense of the term. The acceptance of
imperfection was of the essence of the acceptance of popular
government and yet in no wise indicated the inferiority of popular
government to other possible forms of government For Lincoln,
as for Jefferson, Clay, and others, the only perfect solution of
the American race question was complete separation by the
emigration of the Negroes. For Lincoln the possibility of this solu-
tion was demonstrated in the history of the ancient Hebrews,
who had gone out of Egypt, and the colonists who had departed
from the Old World monarchies, to gain their freedom in the New
World and to establish, eventually, the United States. It has been
demonstrated in our own day by the state of Israel. In advocating
emigration and colonization for the Negroes Lincoln was not
depredating the Negroes; on the contrary, lie paid them a high

386 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

tribute in supposing they had the same capacity for founding
a free society that white men had. Lincoln was impressed, as few
of his critics today are, by the vast cost in human genius and
sacrifice that must go into the erection of free political institutions.
He did not believe that the Negro race would ever fully enjoy
the freedom and equality which had been established by the
efforts of white men until they had established freedom and
equality in a country of their own. Lincoln knew that the opinion
of the average white man was unfavorable to the Negro just
because there was no example of a free indigenous Negro polity
to which Negroes might point as an example of their political
capacity. As long as opinions depended on such evidence, and
as long as such evidence was lacking, so long would "perfect
equality" between the races be Utopian.

In the Ottawa debate Lincoln said he did not believe the two
races could live together upon a footing of "perfect equality,"
but he did not say they could not live together upon a footing
of much greater equality. His pessimism was, in fact, much more
moderate than Jefferson's. In the Civil War, Lincoln went far to
impress the white public with the claims to civil rights which
Negroes had justly acquired by their sacrifices in saving the
Union, a Union which had in some measure become theirs by
virtue of these sacrifices. And when Lincoln began to prepare
his plan for reconstruction, toward the end of the Civil War,
political rights for qualified Negroes was included as a matter
of course. This policy was perfectly consistent with what he had
said in 1858 and earlier. Lincoln never attempted to propose what
was more than one step ahead of the great body of political
public opinion. But he always led the way.

Chapter XVIII

The "Natural Limits" of Slavery
Expansion

WE have already cited the extraordinary statement by Professor
Randall that Douglas's program "would inevitably have made
Kansas free . . /' We have argued that, in so far as Randall relies
for his judgment on the political effects of the doctrine of "popular
sovereignty/' taken by itself, he is utterly mistaken. For Douglas
would have been powerless to resist Buchanan in 1857-58 without
the Republicans in Congress, and there would have been no
Republicans there if Douglas's policy had been accepted in 1854;
and there is no reason to believe that without the continued
opposition to Douglas by Lincoln in 1858 "popular sovereignty"
would have resulted in freedom in Kansas thereafter. But Ran-
dall's thesis, and the whole revisionist case, hinges upon still
another hypothesis. It is that causes other than purely political
ones Would in any case have kept slavery out of Kansas and out
of any other parts of the Union where it was not already estab-
lished. "By 1858 it was evident that slavery in Kansas had no
chance," Randall writes. "After that, as Professor W. O. Lynch
has shown, 'there was no remaining Federal territory where the
conditions were so favorable to slavery/ The fight against the
Lecompton proslavery constitution was won not by reason of any
debate between Lincoln and Douglas, but by the logical workings
of natural causes and by a specific contest in which, with 'the
aid of Republicans, he [Douglas] won the Lecompton fight/" 1

Anyone reading Randall's text would, we think, suppose that
the article of Professor Lynch from which Randall has quoted,

388 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

and which is to be found in the Dictionary of American History,
Volume IV, page 309, contains some evidence to support the con-
tention that "there was no remaining Federal territory where the
conditions were so favorable to slavery." In fact, however, Lynch's
article contains nothing whatever to that effect, except the bare
assertion Randall has quoted. In Lynch's bibliography, however,
one finds listed the classic essay by Charles W. Ramsdell, "The
Natural Limits of Slavery Expansion/' published in The Missis-
sippi Valley Historical Review, October 1929. So far as the present
writer has been able to discover, this essay is the headwater from
which has flowed the "natural causes" thesis upon which Randall,
Lynch, and other revisionists have based their conviction that
freedom in the territories was inevitable. This essay must be one
of the most influential works in American historical writing since
the Civil War. What is remarkable is its acceptance by northern
historians, because the author is one of the most redoubtable and
uncompromising apologists of the southern cause. Like most
southern apologists since the Civil War, he does not think slavery
was the real issue. The "positive good" theory was only the
reaction to abolitionism on which Southerners blame everything
for which no apology can be found but, according to Ramsdell,
abolitionists or not, "There can be little doubt that the institution
of chattel slavery had reached its peak by 1860 and that within
a comparatively short time it would have begun to decline and
eventually have been abolished by the Southerners themselves."
Why the South fought so desperately to preserve an institution it
was about to abolish may be hard to understand. Ramsdell, of
course, would say they were fighting for the rights of the states
which, unlike the Union, were worth fighting for. 2

A man may always be pardoned, and even admired, for making
a spirited defense of the cause of his forefathers. But to see the
"natural causes'* thesis pass from an old Confederate like Ramsdell
to a "Constitutional Unionist" like Randall and then to an
"Abolitionist" like Hofstadter is as bewildering as it is stimulating.
The following occurs in a note to Hofstadter's essay on Lincoln.
"Historians are in general agreement with such contemporaries
of Lincoln as Clay, Webster, Douglas and Hammond, that the
natural limits of slavery expansion in the continental United States
had already been readied." We have italicized the phrase which
shows the title of RamsdeU's essay passing into Hofstadter's

"NATURAL LIMITS" OF SLAVERY EXPANSION 389

language almost as a truism. Strangely neither Hofstadter, in his
three-page, fine-print bibliography, nor Randall, in his bibliog-
raphy of over fifty pages appended to the second volume of
Lincoln the President, lists the Ramsdell "Natural Limits" essay.
This is the more surprising because both list Ramsdell's far less
consequential essay blaming Lincoln for the firing on Fort Sumter.
Yet Randall disagrees with the Sumter piece, which he lists, and
agrees with the "natural limits" piece, which he does not list.
And the firing on Sumter, important as it is as an episode, can
hardly be compared in importance with the question of the
reality of the slavery-extension issue, which was the avowed
political cause of secession. Can it be that Randall and Hofstadter
do not wish to acknowledge their debt to the Southerner, even
when he helps them damn Lincoln, who was neither secessionist,
constitutional unionist, nor abolitionist?

So far as we know, it is Ramsdell, and not Clay, Webster,
Douglas, or Hammond, whom recent historians have followed.
As for Clay and Webster, we do not know what evidence
Hofstadter has since he gives nonethat they believed slavery
to have reached its "natural limits" in the continental United
States. During the Senate debates on the Kansas-Nebraska bill
in the spring of 1854, Chase, Sumner, Seward, and other of its
opponents proved beyond a peradventure as Lincoln was to do
in his Peoria speech the following fall that the compromisers
of 1850 certainly the Whig compromisers had no territories in
mind but those acquired from Mexico. Webster's celebrated
seventh of March speech, as we have shown in an earlier chap-
ter, 8 only referred to former Mexican soil, from which all anti-
slavery men, and Douglas, believed it was banned by Mexican
law, until such time as there was a positive enactment sanctioning
slavery by American authority. So far as we know, neither Clay
nor Webster ever said, or implied, that slavery would not expand
anywhere in the continental United States if all legal prohibitions
were withdrawn. Clay and Webster did, however, speak of
natural causes keeping slavery out of the Mexican Southwest. In
this sense they did propound a "natural limits" theory of a sort.
However, there was a vast difference for statesmen to propound
such a belief to gain acceptance of a specific legislative measure
and for scholars to employ it as a general theory for the interpre-
tation of history. As we shall shortly show, the concept of a natural

390 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

limit to slavery is, as a scientific theory, false and should never
have commanded the assent of any reflecting person. Certainly
no one who has read Lincoln's speeches, where it is thoroughly
refuted, should have entertained it for a moment. As propounded
by Webster, Clay, and Douglas in 1850, it meant only that it was
improbable that slavery would go into such a place as New
Mexico Territory in the foreseeable future. The justification for
Webster is that he used a plausible but specious argument to
persuade the North to forgo the Wilmot Proviso, because he
believed that the Compromise of 1850, taken as a whole, was a
Union-saving measure, in the interest of the entire country. And
the compromise would have been impossible if the Proviso de-
mand had been insisted upon by the North. The idea that God
and nature would keep slavery out of the newly acquired South-
west was an argument addressed to the North and designed to
make palatable a concession which, in any case, was being paid
for by such southern concessions as the admission of California
as a free state. It is almost inconceivable that Webster or Clay
would have accepted the "natural limits" theory to defend the
repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which was a wholly gratui-
tous, uncompensated concession to pro-slavery opinion. But even
if Webster's argument was more plausible than we believe it ever
was, there is no excuse for historians repeating it, nearly a century
afterward, when experience has revealed its utter hollo wness. For
in 1859, as we have already noted, the territorial government
of New Mexico actually passed a slave code for that vast region.
The revisionists, we are aware, would reply that, even with the
slave code, slavery did not go into New Mexico. To this we
would rejoin that the sectional crisis came to a head barely a
year after the code was passed and that the election of Lincoln
persuaded most slaveowners not to venture forth in any direction
with their property until the secession issue was settled. The
following is from a letter written by the Secretary of the New
Mexico Territory to an acquaintance in Washington on August 16,
1858, during the thick of the Lincoln-Douglas campaign:

It is generally believed here that the territorial legislature
will pass some kind of a slave code for the territory at the
next session. It is true that we have few slaves here, but
Otero [New Mexico's delegate to Congress] has let it be

"NATURAL LIMITS" OF SLAVERY EXPANSION 391

known that if N. M. expects any favors from Wash. [i.e.,
from the Buchanan administration], a slave code would be
a wise move. The governor and most of the other officials
are favorable to it ... We have assured the Mexicans that
it will protect their own system of peonage . . , 4

So much for the way in which political causes supplemented
"natural causes" in helping "popular sovereignty" along. But less
than ten years after Webster had declaimed so about God and
nature forbidding slavery in New Mexico, we find such sentiments
as the following, expressed in a letter by an Associate Justice of
the territory, a native New Englander, to the Attorney General
of the United States, February 14, 1859:

This body has passed a law for the protection of slave prop-
erty in the territory. This was necessary, for the truth is I
do not see how Americans are going to get on here without
slavery. It can't be done. The Peons are not worth their salt
and all other labor is unattainable. Slave labor can be made
very profitable by cultivating the soil, and I will venture to
say that a man with a half dozen negroes would make a
fortune at the present prices of produce . . . and grains. The
soil in the bottoms is very rich and productive. You must
not place any credence in the story that slave property could
not be made available here. 5

It is our impression that the word "available" in the last sentence
is employed in the somewhat archaic sense of "useful," or "capa-
ble of succeeding," as an "available" candidate for office. However,
to anyone who, like Professor Hofstadter, still takes the Webster
argument of 1850 seriously, we offer the foregoing as expert
testimony from someone on the spot to the effect that the soil
and climate argument, as applied to New Mexico, was nothing
but what Lincoln called a "lullaby." Another reason why there
were few slaves in New Mexico is that just before the war slave
prices were skyrocketing. They were in such demand in the older
slave lands that it was almost impossible to buy them for the
newer lands. We should note, moreover, that while the New
Mexican legislature was passing a slave code it also passed a
series of measures to strengthen the system of peonage. Ramsdell
and others have maintained that the cheapness of Mexican labor
made Negro slavery unlikely in the Southwest. In fact, however,

392 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

the two systems helped each other. Negro slavery helped to
reinforce peonageor would have if it had remained available
as an alternative source of labor. The worst effects of peonage,
which was scarcely better than slavery, would have been impossi-
ble to ameliorate if slavery had continued to exist nearby. And
Lincoln's whole point was that, where men were free to introduce
slavery, any alternative labor system was bound to be depressed
to a condition approximating that of the slaves. To sum up: the
"natural limits" and "popular sovereignty" theories had their prime
test in New Mexico, and what was happening there even as the
Lincoln-Douglas debates were in progress vindicated Lincoln's
contentions during the debates.

RamsdelFs essay is very persuasive in establishing a very
limited proposition; viz., that by 1860 the traditional southern
plantation system of cotton culture had extended about as far
as it was likely to extend within the existing boundaries of the
United States. He does except some large areas of Texas, which
the railroads had not yet made accessible to markets and which
were also unusable until the invention of the barbed-wire fence
made the fields immune to the depredations of cattle, because
the lands in question were far from fencing timber. But RamsdelTs
essay proves nothing whatever as to the possibility of slavery
being extended by the employment of slaves in other occupations.
Nor does it prove that any existing limitations were permanent
limitations. It is precisely this last point at which Lincoln took
aim when he employed one of his most oft-repeated and prescient
arguments in the joint debates. We take the text from the last
joint debate at Alton, although he said substantially the same
thing at Springfield, July 17, 1858, and at Jonesboro and Quincy
in the joint meetings, as well as in innumerable speeches on the
stump.

Brooks of South Carolina once declared that when this
Constitution was framed, its framers did not look to the
institution existing until this day. When he said this, I think
he stated a fact that is fully borne out by the history of the
times. But he also said they were better and wiser men than
the men of these days; yet the men of these days had ex-
perience which they had not, and by the invention of the

"NATURAL LIMITS" OF SLAVERY EXPANSION 393

cotton gin it became a necessity in this country that slavery
should be perpetual. I now say that . . . Judge Douglas has
been the most prominent instrument in changing the position
of slavery . . . and putting it upon Brook's cotton-gin ba-
sis ... Q

"Brooks's cotton-gin basis'* means a basis in which any possibility
to make profit from the Negro is not to be prevented by any
considerations of the Negro's rights. But it means still more. It
means that the expectation of the Fathers, an expectation based
on the economic prospects of slavery before the invention of the
cotton gin, was utterly confounded by the invention of the cotton
gin. If Professor Ramsdell had written an essay on the "natural"
limits of slavery in 1790, he would have seen those limits utterly
destroyed before the end of 1791. If, then, a human invention
can completely overturn limits set by "nature," nature is a most
fickle thing to rely upon. In short, the idea of a "natural" limit
to a human institution is, as we have maintained, an absurdity.
One invention had completely altered the prospects of freedom
of millions of human beings. The mid-nineteenth century was very
self-conscious of the rapid technological changes that were revo-
lutionizing the conditions of human life. Lincoln himself lectured
on science and inventions after the campaign against Douglas
and had patented an invention of his own. "Brooks's cotton-gin
basis" therefore implied the following further questions: shall we
permit the institution of human slavery to be revolutionized by
any future technological development? Shall human rights be the
slave of technology, or shall technology be the slave of human
rights? Without a moral decision against slavery no guarantee for
the future was possible. Certainly there is no scrap of evidence
in Ramsdelfs essay that there was in 1860 any more of a guarantee
against the expansion of slavery than that which existed in 1790.

That slavery was wedded, by and large, to cotton in the
antebellum South may be true. But this is to be explained by
the extraordinary profitability of cotton culture and proves nothing
as to the possibility of the exploitation of slave labor in other
fields of human production. That Negro slavery could be main-
tained only in connection with the simpler forms of unskilled
field labor is a myth contradicted even by those who spread it.
Ramsdell himself refers to "negro mechanics . . . hired at high

394 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

wages. He does not say these were slaves, but it is notorious
that many wereas well as that their owners kept most of their
wages. Kenneth Stampp, in his admirable recent survey The
Peculiar Institution, 7 says that although, for obvious reasons, the
bulk of the slaves were employed in cotton and similar agricul-
tural pursuits, "In 1860, probably a half million bondsmen lived
in southern cities and towns, or were engaged in work not directly
or indirectly connected with agriculture," and that "in spite of
the protests of free laborers," they "worked in virtually every
skilled and unskilled occupation." 8 And as revealing as words
can be of the truth of Lincoln's position is the following: "Some
Southerners were enthusiastic crusaders for the development of
factories which would employ slaves. They were convinced that
bondsmen could be trained in all necessary skills [for which
conviction there was abundant empirical evidence] and would
provide a cheaper and more manageable form of labor than free
whites." 9 Professor Stampp also gives an example of a famous
iron company in Richmond, Virginia, which introduced slaves into
its labor force in the 1840'$, with the result that the free laborers
eventually struck in protest. Then the manager, like countless
managers since, "vowed he would show his workers that they
could not dictate his labor policies: he refused to re-employ any
of the strikers." 10 Thereafter the company employed only slaves.
When Lincoln made his New England tour in March 1860, after
the Cooper Union speech, he came to New Haven, Connecticut,
in the midst of a shoe strike. The strike was, in part, occasioned
by the loss of southern business by reason of an attempt to apply
pressure, via the boycott, upon Republican businesses and busi-
nessmen. Yet Lincoln grasped this nettle firmly when he said:

I am glad to see that system of labor prevails in New Eng-
land under which laborers can strike when they want to,
where they are not obliged to work under all circumstances,
and are not tied down and obliged to labor whether you
pay them or not! I like the system which lets a man quit
when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere.
One of the reasons I am opposed to Slavery is just here. 11

Southern apologists who speak of a "natural limit" to slavery are
really thinking not of economic "nature" but of the nature of the
Negro. What they seem to assume, perhaps half consciously, is
that the Negro is a kind of domestic animal, limited in usefulness

"NATURAL LIMITS" OF SLAVERY EXPANSION 395

like a horse or a mule. Lincoln's fundamental objection to the
whole "soil and climate" thesis stemmed from his simple assump-
tion that the Negro was a man and that as such he was capable
of being exploited in any way that human labor might be ex-
ploited. Any break in the legal barriers confining slavery was a
threat to free labor, because slave labor could be used to degrade
free labor wherever there was a legal possibility of their being
used side by side. Slavery, moreover, was a protean institution,
as Professor Stampp's recent book convincingly shows. There were
many forms that the relationship of master and servant could
and did take, and there is no reason to suppose that, should
slavery in the mines, foundries, factories, and fields of the free
states have proved advantageous to powerful groups therein, new
systems of discipline might not have been invented to make the
exploitation of slave labor highly profitable. The totalitarian
regimes of the twentieth century provide us with ample evidence
of the variety of ways that this might have been done. Even
if it were true that tie productivity of a system based on free
labor is greater than one based on slave labor, it does not follow
that it is more profitable to the men who run it. A large portion
of a smaller sum may still be more than a small portion of a
larger one. All we know of the fierce struggles, the long uphill
climb, of free labor in the grip of the industrial revolution that
followed the Civil War suggests that it never could have suc-
ceeded, as it has, if in addition to all other handicaps the incubus
of slavery could have been placed in the scales against it. If the
great corporations, the "robber barons" who came to dominate
the state legislatures in the postbellum period, had wanted to
import slaves as strikebreakers, then it would not have required
even another Dred Scott decision to spread slavery to the free
states. It is simply unhistorical to say that such a thing couldn't
have happened because it didn't happen. It didn't happen because
Lincoln was resolved that it shouldn't happen. And nothing but
his implacable resolve made it impossible.

The thesis that slavery would not have gone into the territories,
whether it was prohibited by law or not, is the fundamental thesis
of revisionism in dealing with the political causes of the Civil
War. But this thesis is itself a subordinate manifestation of an
apology for the South which has received a classic formulation
in the work of Ramsdell. The main thesis of this apology, which

396 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

we have already given in Ramsdell's words, is that slavery as an
economic institution had reached its peak in 1860 and was about
to decline. Gradual emancipation was "just around the corner/*
if only the Republicans had not placed the South on the defensive.
This contention has recently received its most detailed and
circumstantial refutation in a monograph written under the
auspices of the National Bureau of Economic Research by two
Harvard economists, Professors Alfred H. Conrad and John Meyer.
"The Economics of Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South," published
in The Journal of Political Economy, April 1958, is the most en-
lightening piece of original research we have encountered on the
slavery question.

According to the authors, this study is the first attempt to
measure the profitability of slavery according to the economic,
as opposed to the accounting, concept of profitability. The debate
over the profitability of slavery, they note, has been conducted
in terms of a variety of accounting methods, usually shaped to
prove the debaters' contentions and seldom comparable one with
another. Conrad and Meyer have attempted to measure the
profitability of southern slave operations in terms of modern
capital theory. And what they have concluded is that the rate of
return on male slave capital employed in the field ranged between
5 and 7 per cent in the majority of antebellum cotton plantation
operations, while the rate on female slave capital, from both field
work and procreation, averaged 8 per cent. These returns, they
say, compare favorably with contemporary returns of 6 to 7 per
cent on genuinely alternative investment opportunities.

Slavery, they maintain, was profitable to the whole South, the
continuing demand for labor in the cotton belt ensuring returns
to the breeding operations on the less productive land in the
seaboard and border states. The breeding returns were necessary,
however, to make the plantation operations on the poorer lands
as profitable as alternative contemporary economic activities. The
failure of southern agriculture on these poorer lands in the post-
bellum period is probably attributable, they say, mainly to the
loss of capital gains from slave breeding and not to the relative
inefficiency of the tenant system that replaced plantations or the
soil damage resulting from the war. This last point, we observe, is
of great importance. It is a reply to those who charge the freed
Negroes with incapacity as agriculturists when separated from
their old overseers. What the freed Negroes were unable to do

"NATUBAL UMTTS" OF SLAVERY EXPANSION 397

to compete with the old plantation system was to sell themselves
to balance their budget! Shades of Swift's "Modest Proposal!"
The Conrad and Meyer work is striking for its data on the
importance of slave breeding to the entire slave economy. As
they mention, this was something that Southerners, then and
since, have gone to great lengths to deny and to conceal. We may
recall 12 that Douglas in 1849 had expected all the border states,
from Missouri to Delaware, to adopt schemes for gradual emanci-
pation. If soil and climate in these states had been the sole
determining factor, his expectation might have been correct. But
the Conrad and Meyer work shows that the employment of slaves
in these states, plus the sale of the surplus Negroes raised there,
maintained the profitability of slavery there. The South, they note,
had developed a price structure for slaves and efficient market
mechanisms for transferring slaves. Because of this no argument
based on the soil and climate in a region which did not take
into account the profits from breeding can be accounted ade-
quate. Thus, they further conclude that continued expansion of
slave territory was both possible and, to some extent, necessary.
The maintenance of profits depended, they say, upon either
intensive or extensive expansion. Intensive expansion, we would
add, could only mean greater use of more skilled slaves, and this
in itself would have suggested the feasibility of, and have
encouraged the use of slaves in, the lands of farming supposedly
reserved for the yeoman farmers of the West. As to the alleged
inefficiency of slave labor in all but certain kinds of farming, Con-
rad and Meyer are, like Stampp, entirely unimpressed. They note
that slaves were employed in cotton factories throughout the
South, in coal mines, in lumbering, and in iron works (as al-
ready noted), and they say that southern railroads were largely
built by slaves. In short, there is almost nothing to suggest that
slaves, like free Negroes since the Civil War, might not have
gone almost anywhere the law and the whites allowed, doing
any work white men did, if given the chance.

In concluding this portion of our argument, we would merely
note that the Conrad and Meyer paper is not only a refutation
of the Ramsdell "natural limits" theory, but it is a vindication
of another argument that Lincoln used, with ever greater empha-
sis, as the Civil War approached. In commenting on the difficulties
of finding support for a plan of gradual emancipation and coloni-

398 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

zation, he had observed at the end of his Dred Scott speech,
"The plainest print cannot be read through a gold eagle; and it
will be ever hard to find many men who will send a slave to
Liberia, and pay his passage, while they can send him to a new
country, Kansas for instance, and sell him for fifteen hundred
dollars, and the rise." 13 And in the New Haven speech, from
which we have quoted above, Lincoln also spoke as follows:

The owners of these slaves consider them property. The
effect upon the minds of the owners is that of property, and
nothing else it induces them to insist upon all that will
favorably affect its value as property, to demand laws and
institutions and a public policy that shall increase and secure
its value, and make it durable, lasting and universal . . . The
slaveholder does not like to be considered a mean fellow . . .
and hence he has to struggle within himself and sets about
arguing himself into the belief that Slavery is right. The
property influences his mind. The dissenting minister, who
argued some theological point with one of the established
church, was always met with the reply, "I can't see it so." He
opened the Bible, and pointed him to a passage, but the
orthodox minister replied, "I can't see it so." Then he showed
him a single word "Can you see that?" "Yes, I see it," was
the reply. The dissenter laid a guinea over the word and
asked, "Do you see it now?" So here, whether the owners
of this species of property do really see it as it is, it is not
for me to say, but if they do, they see it as it is through
2,000,000,000 of dollars, and that is a pretty thick coating. 14

The necessity for the expansion of slavery, and the reality of the
need for new lands, if the value of that multi-billion dollar
investment was to be safeguarded, was implicitly confessed by
Douglas himself in his last rejoinder in the joint debates at Alton.
Lincoln's idea, said Douglas,

is that he will prohibit slavery in all the territories, and
thus force them all to become free states, surrounding the
slave states with a cordon of free states, and hemming them
in, keeping the slaves confined to their present limits whilst
they go on multiplying until the soil on which they live will
no longer feed them, and he will thus be able to put slavery
in a course of ultimate extinction by starvation. 15

"NATURAL LIMITS" OF SLAVERY EXPANSION 399

Of course, Douglas did not entertain the thought that the schemes
of emancipation proposed by Jefferson might be revived again,
even by Southerners, once the confinement of slavery lowered
the rate of return upon slaves. Certainly schemes of compensated
emancipation would stand a chance if the compensation was for
an investment of dwindling value. In this sense Douglas has
accurately stated Lincoln's purpose. But it is difficult to compre-
hend how any one could have said, as Professor Randall has,
that in 1858 "big and fundamental things about slavery and the
Negro were not on the agenda . . ."

Chapter XIX

Did the Republicans Abandon Lincoln's
Principles after the Election of 1860?

OF ALL the distortions concerning the significance of the Lincoln-
Douglas debates circulated by revisionists, none is more damning
to the reputation of the Republican party led by Lincoln than
the charge that the main plank in the campaigns of 1858 and
1860 was abandoned after Lincoln's election. A concise statement
of this charge may be found in Hofstadter's essay on Lincoln:
"But the supreme irony [of the Lincoln-Douglas debates] can
be found in the fact that early in 1861 the Republicans in Con-
gress gave their votes to measures organizing the territories of
Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota without prohibiting slavery. After
beating Douglas in 1860, they organized the territories along the
pattern of his policy, not Lincoln's." 1 Hofstadter has clearly taken
this theme from Randall, but it is so important for an appreciation
both of history and of historians that we trouble the reader with
the parallel passage in Randall's work:

. . . any serious student of the subject should turn to the
proceedings in Congress early in 1861. If Lincoln had been
elected senator, and if in that period he had voted as did
the great majority of Republicans in Congress on bills organ-
izing the territories of Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota, he
would actually have been taking the Douglas position, for
these territories were organized by Republican votes without
prohibition of slavery . . . This seems to suggest that . . .
in a broader analysis, the "issue" of abolition in the territories

LINCOLN'S PRINCIPLES OF 1860 ABANDONED? 401

was a talking point ... a campaign appeal rather than a
guide for legislation. 2

We pause only to note that there was no issue of "abolition" in
the territories. Randall has again fallen into Douglas's vernacular.
Lincoln always pointed out that there was no need to abolish
slavery in the territories; his aim was to keep it out. The foregoing
passage is from Randall's chapter on the debates, but in his chap-
ter on the secession crisis of the winter of 1860-61 he returns
to the charge thus:

It has been noted above how Douglas was able in 1861
to taunt the Republicans with abandonment of those princi-
ples on which the Lincoln-Douglas debates had been waged
in 1858. That point deserves further notice here. When the
aforementioned acts organizing Colorado, Nevada, and Da-
kota were passed (February-March 1861), the prohibition
or permission of slavery was not mentioned in these statutes,
which left the question of slavery in the territories exactly
where it was in Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, so
far as congressional legislation was concerned . . . After the
proceedings had been completed regarding the three ter-
ritorial bills . . . Douglas could not refrain from making his
comment. "This very session," he said, "the Republican party,
in both Houses of Congress . . . have backed down from
their platform and abandoned the doctrine of congressional
prohibition . . . They have abandoned the doctrine of the
President elect . . ." 3

The foregoing passages, from both Hofstadter and Randall, are
as remarkable for what they omit as for what they say. Let us
consider the situation during this last, lame-duck session of the
Thirty-sixth Congress, and then we will also take note of certain
subsequent events.

In the first place, the election of Lincoln in the fall of 1860
had been followed by the secession of South Carolina on Decem-
ber 20, 1861, and South Carolina was soon followed by Georgia,
Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, all of which
"left" the Union before the inauguration of Lincoln. It was in the
midst of the desperate efforts to preserve the Union that the three
territorial bills mentioned were passed. The most notable of these
efforts was the Crittenden Compromise. The provisions of this

4O2 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

last-ditch attempt to stem the tide of secession, and apparently
the only one that southern leaders would support, may be sum-
marized in the words of Professor Randall in his The Civil War
and Reconstruction.

Let slavery be prohibited in national territory north of the
line 36 degrees 30 minutes, but let it be established and
maintained by Federal protection south of that line; let future
states, north or south of the line, come into the Union with
or without slavery as they wish; restrain Congress from
abolishing slavery in places within national jurisdiction which
may be surrounded by slave states . . . 4

We forbear at this point because the main points have been given.
The key to the Crittenden Compromise, of course, is the division
of the nation's territory along the parallel of the Missouri Com-
promise line. And it was at this point at which most Republicans
in Congress stuck. The purpose of the Republican party was, as
we have seen, to restore the Missouri Compromise prohibition.
But it meant to do this because it meant, as a matter of principle,
to forbid slavery anywhere that the authority of Congress ex-
tended. Lincoln never would have tampered with the Compro-
mise of 1850 if the slave power had not tampered with the
Compromise of 1820. But now that all the territories had been
opened to slavery, by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred
Scott decision, he meant to close them all to slavery the moment
the political means for doing so were available. While the meas-
ures in the Crittenden Compromise were being discussed, Lincoln
passed the word of the incoming administration to its congres-
sional followers. We quote from a letter addressed to William
Kellogg from Springfield, December 11, 1860:

Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the
extension of slavery. The instant you do, they have us under
again; all our labor is lost, and sooner or later must be done
over. Douglas is sure to be again trying to bring in his "Pop.
Sov." Have none of it. The tug has to come & better now
than later. 5

And again, to another Republican, December 18, 1860:

I am sorry any republican inclines to dally with Pop. Sov.
of any sort. It acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with

UNCOILS PRINCIPLES OF i860 ABANDONED? 403

liberty, and surrenders all we have contended for. Once
fastened on us as a settled policy, filibustering for all South
of us, and making slave states of it, follows in spite of us,
with an early Supreme Court decision, holding our free-state
constitutions to be unconstitutional. 6

With secession in full cry, and with the imbecile Buchanan
wringing his hands and saying secession was unconstitutional but
the Constitution forbade him to do anything about it, the Republi-
cans in Congress were under enormous pressure to make some
concessions to keep the country together, at least until a President
of their choice took office. It is indicative of that pressure that
Kellogg, to whom the first letter above was addressed, in spite
of Lincoln's advice, introduced a bill to amend the Constitution
so that slaves could be taken into any territory south of the
Missouri line latitude. But the whole weight of the President-elect
was thrown against any compromise that would admit the right
of slavery to go into a single foot of the national domain. Upon
the rock of Lincoln's fidelity to the principle of his campaign
against Douglas every compromise foundered in that fateful
winter. Whether Lincoln was doctrinaire in this insistence may
be debated, but that he stuck to his principle can in no wise be
doubted.

When the bills organizing Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota were
passed, Buchanan was still in the White House. And since he was
thoroughly committed to the Dred Scott decision, any bill con-
taining a prohibition of slavery in the territories would certainly
have been vetoed. But the Republicans did not, in any case,
have a majority in both houses of the second session of the Thirty-
sixth Congress. They had a slight majority in the House, but in
the Senate there were twenty-six Republicans, thirty-six Demo-
crats, two Americans, and two vacancies. 7 It is true that after
the congressional delegations from the seceding states had with-
drawn the Republicans might have pressed for the slavery pro-
hibitions in the territorial bills. But the secession issue was not
finally settled, and the attitude of the border states still hung in
the balance. It would have been madness to have pressed a
temporary voting advantage when the attitude of the border
states, upon which all might yet depend, still was unsettled. The
fact that they stood firm against any commitment to abandon
their intention to ban slavery in the territories is surely as much

404 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

an exhibition of principle as practical wisdom could have re-
quired.

The denouement of this story, which is omitted altogether by
Hofstadter, and which is not omitted by Randall, but told with-
out any suggestion of its relevance to the Lincoln-Douglas debates,
came the following year. We give it in Randall's words from the
second volume of Lincoln the President:*

Two months after having provided emancipation in the
District, Congress abolished slavery in the territories of the
United States then existing or thereafter to be formed or ac-
quired [Act of June 12, 1862], In this instance, as in the
District case, Congress passed and Lincoln signed a bill
which, by ruling law according to Supreme Court interpreta-
tion, was unconstitutional. This fact, as well as the legal
extinction of that explosive territorial situation which had pro-
duced such prodigious prewar agitation, was allowed to pass
over with little comment.

This grudging record of the "legal extinction" of any possibility of
slavery in United States territories may also, with charity, be
allowed to pass with little comment. What should not be passed
over, however, is the fact that in June 1862, six months after the
meeting of the first regular session of the first Congress sitting
during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, slavery in the terri-
tories of the United States "then existing or thereafter to be
formed or acquired" was prohibited. If this constituted an aban-
donment of the principles of the campaign of 1858, if this was
not a consummation of everything Lincoln had fought for that
fateful summer, then words have no meaning.

Chapter XX
The End of Manifest Destiny

HAVING just noted Lincoln's iron refusal, in the midst of the
secession crisis of the winter of 1860-61, to concede any right to
slavery south of 36'3o" latitude, we can understand why he would
never have viewed with approval any of the devices by which
Douglas attempted in the years 1848, 1849, or ^5 * secure
any division of the nation's territory by extending the Missouri
line. For Lincoln was perfectly convinced that any such division,
however superficially unfavorable it might appear to be to the
interests of slavery, involved a wrongful concession of principle.
It would have been wrongful in itself, and it would have been
utterly unreliable. Lincoln knew that the vast acquisitions of the
Mexican War were only a foretaste of what Douglas himself be-
lieved to be in store if he ever gained control of the nation's
foreign policy. Only a national commitment to confine slavery,
Lincoln believed, would put an end to the drive for foreign con-
quest and domination. Many historians have doubted that there
was any considerable support in the South for filibustering. And,
of course, there is widespread disbelief that Douglas was inter-
ested in extending slavery. What they have failed to take into
account, however, was the dynamism in the coincidence of the
ambitions of Douglas and the slave power. It was this coincidence
that repealed the Missouri Compromise. For, say what one will
as to the precipitating force of the Appeal of the Independent
Democrats, Douglas did strike a bargain with the Southerners,
and there was nothing in his policy or principles which inhibited
him from indulging any requirement of slavery. That Douglas

406 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

would have consented to the expansion of slavery as a means to
other ends we can hardly doubt. No end was more potently de-
sired by Douglas than the destruction of British power in the
Western Hemisphere. To accomplish this Douglas would always
have permitted the Devil to name his price. And the Devil was
Slavery.

The fourth question Lincoln put to Douglas at Freeport has
also been overshadowed by the famous second question. It, too,
has a significance that can hardly be exaggerated. Lincoln asked:
"Are you in favor of acquiring additional territory, in disregard
of how such acquisition may affect the nation on the slavery ques-
tion?" Here is an extract from Douglas's reply:

. . . this is a young and growing nation. It swarms as often
as a hive of bees, and . . . there must be hives in which they
can gather and make their honey. In less than fifteen years,
if the same progress that has distinguished this country for
the last fifteen years continues, every foot of vacant land be-
tween this and the Pacific Ocean, owned by the United
States, will be occupied. Will you not continue to increase
at the end of fifteen years as well as now? I tell you, increase,
and multiply, and expand, is the law of this nation's existence.
You cannot limit this great republic by mere boundary lines,
saying, "thus far shalt thou go, and no further." Any one of
you gentlemen might as well say to a son twelve years old
that he is big enough, and must not grow any larger, and in
order to prevent his growth put a hoop around him to keep
him to his present size. What would be the result? Either the
hoop must burst ... or the child must die. So it would be
with this great nation. With our natural increase . . . with
the tide of emigration that is fleeing despotism in the old
world to seek a refuge in our own, there is a constant torrent
pouring into this country that requires more land, more terri-
tory upon which to settle, and just as fast as our interests
and our destiny require additional territory in the north, in
the south, or in the islands of the ocean, I am for it, and
when we acquire it will leave the people, according to the
Nebraska Bill, free to do as they please on the subject of
slavery and every other question. 1

Let us note that, according to this doctrine, the land area of the
Western Hemisphere became usable only by being incorporated

THE END OF MANIFEST DESTINY 407

into the United States! Neither Mexico nor Canada, by Douglas's
calculations, could provide population outlets except by being first
sacrificed to the Moloch of Manifest Destiny. But as Douglas
could not bear to contemplate any partnership of British and
American power, so Lincoln always tacitly assumed it to be a
sound basis for American freedom. In 1845 Lincoln had written
that he could never see much good to come of Texas annexation
"inasmuch as they were already a free republican people on our
own model." This was Clay's attitude, and it cost Clay the
presidency, because he underestimated the popular fear that
Texas might form an alliance with Britain. Still, Lincoln could
see no reason in 1858 why every expansion of freedom would
have to take place by an expansion of the boundaries of the
United States. How Lincoln scorned Douglas's expansionism we
may gather from the following rebuttal to Douglas's answer to his
fourth Freeport question. It was delivered at Galesburg:

If Judge Douglas's policy upon this question succeeds, and
gets fairly settled down, until all opposition is crushed out.,
the next thing will be a grab for the territory of poor Mexico,
and invasion of the rich lands of South America, then the
adjoining islands will follow, each one of which promises
additional slave fields. And this question is to be left to the
people of those countries for settlement When we shall get
Mexico, I don't know whether the Judge will be in favor of
the Mexican people that we get with it settling this question
for themselves and all others; because we know the Judge
has a great horror for mongrels, and I understand that the
people of Mexico are most decidedly a race of mongrels. 1
understand that there is not more than one person there out
of eight who is pure white, and I suppose from the Judge's
previous declaration that when we get Mexico or any con-
siderable portion of it, that he will be in favor of these
mongrels settling this question, which would bring him some-
what into collision with his horror of an inferior race. 2

The ugly potentialities of a policy of lebensraum combined with
facial supremacy should hardly need explanatory comment today.
The accents of sarcasm in the foregoing extract can scarcely es-
cape notice. Of the ''mongrels'* to the south Douglas had spoken
thus at Springfield, July 17, 1858:

408 THE CASE FOR LINCOLN

We are witnessing the result of giving civil and political
rights to inferior races in Mexico, Central America, in South
America, and in the West India Islands. Those young men
who went from here to Mexico to fight the battles of their
country in the Mexican war, can tell you the fruits of negro
equality with the white man. They will tell you that the result
of that equality is social amalgamation, demoralization and
degradation, below the capacity for self-government. 3

Douglas's white supremacy, American empire, would have been
a very different polity from anything envisaged in the pristine
purity of the republican ideal of the Founding Fathers. There
would have been precious little "popular sovereignty" for the na-
tives for whom Douglas had such contempt. And there might be
many American states today in which, as in the case of the French
in Algeria, a privileged minority would be engulfed in the swirl-
ing tides of hatred of an unprivileged majority of a different
complexion. The problem of racial adjustment in America today
is of an order of magnitude that we could hardly exaggerate. And
this problem, as every informed person knows, although drama-
tized by the struggle of the Negro, is not limited to the Negro.
Indians, Mexicans, Orientals have all had a desperate struggle,
varying in times, places, and intensity, to achieve the dignity
which our fundamental law and principles hold out to all. Aspira-
tion must, as Lincoln implied in his "standard maxim" doctrine,
always transcend fulfillment. Yet it is essential that the possibility
of fulfillment does not fall so far short of the aspiration as to make
it not a source of hope but a mockery. Douglas's formula for solv-
ing the slavery question, in which the nation was already hope-
lessly entangled, would have made that question infinitely more
complicated. It is almost inconceivable that democratic processes
could have survived such complications. And we can only shudder
to think what the twentieth century would be like if the United
States had entered it as first and foremost of totalitarian powers.

The only moral justification of Douglas's policy as of revisionist
historiographyis a tacit belief in the idea of progress, an idea
that economic forces were "inevitably" working for freedom, both
on the plains of Kansas and elsewhere. Only such a belief could

THE END OF MANIFEST DESTINY 409

justify the principle that all harsh moral alternatives were to be
avoided, that one could safely "agree to disagree/' The silent
forces of history were working for freedom, if only the politicians
would give them time. Lincoln's whole policy, on the contrary,
was a denial that things would take care of themselves, that prog-
ress would result from anything but man's foresight, judgment,
and courage. The impulse of the Revolution had been a mighty
one, Lincoln believed, and great things had been achieved be-
cause of it. But the spirit of '76 and the spirit of Nebraska were
utter incompatibilities. The Nebraska bill could never even have
been considered if there had not been an enormous change in
public opinion, a change for the worse that augured still further
changes for the worse, changes which portended the utter extinc-
tion of a weary mankind's hope that there might at last be a
demonstration of man's capability to govern himself. To avert
these changes no reliance could be placed on anything so absurd
as "soil and climate." The only reliance, the only rock upon which
man's political salvation might be built, was man's moral sense, the
determination of some men to be free, and the awareness that no
man can rightfully achieve freedom for himself or, in the presence
of a just God, long retain his freedom if he would deny to any
other man, of whatever race or nation, the right to equal freedom.

Notes

Chapter I

1. Lincoln the President (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company,
1945), I, p. 127.

2. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, II,
PP- 33<>, 332, 338.

3. Abraham Lincoln, Pocket Book Edition, p. 161.

4. See the introductory essay on Carl Becker by George H. Sabine,
prefaced to Becker's Freedom and Responsibility in the American
Way of Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1955). Sabine explains
that Becker was a "relativist" according to whom history must
be "continually rewritten," not because of the discovery of new
facts, but because the historian is necessarily dominated by the
"preconceptions" and "value judgments" of the age in which he
lives, and it is these preconceptions which determine the meaning
he finds in the facts. Becker would have derided Randall's idea
of restoring "reality," as a masquerade of the historian's prejudices
in the guise of "detachment." Randall, we presume, might have
questioned Becker's cogency when the latter affirmed, "Everything
is unstable . . . except the idea of instability."

5. Op. cit., Chapter V, "Lincoln and Douglas."

6. Quoted by Rhodes, op. cit., II, p. 329.

7. Randall maintains (op. cit., pp. 126, 129-31) that popular sover-
eignty actually did keep slavery out of Kansas and that, since
the Republicans in 1861 actually organized the territories of
Dakota, Nevada, and Colorado without congressional prohibitions
of slavery, the Douglas of the debates was thoroughly vindicated.
But, as we shall argue at length later, this assertion involves a
number of hypotheses and is no mere statement of fact; e.g., did
the "principle of popular sovereignty" keep slavery from these
places, or did free-soil opinion and determination, which rejected
that principle when it rejected Douglas's leadership, keep it out?

8. Randall, op. cit., p. 158.

9. On the conflict between the Illinois and eastern Republicans, see
Don E. Fehrenbacher, "The Nomination of Abraham Lincoln in
1858," in the Abraham Lincoln Quarterly, March 1950.

10. The expression "needless war" is taken from Ceorge Fort Milton's

NOTES 411

Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War. (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.) That it expresses the key theme of
revisionist historiography is ably set forth by Thomas J. Pressly,
Americans Interpret Their Civil War (Princeton University, 1954),
Chapter Seven, "Repressible Conflict/' pp. 257 ff. The other expres-
sions I have chosen (they could be endlessly multiplied) are Ran-
dall's. The beginnings of a reaction to revisionism, particularly in
the reviews, are also documented in Pressly's book. Of particular
distinction is Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr/s "The Causes of the Civil
War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism," Partisan Review,
October 1949. This short but remarkable essay certainly anticipates
in principle some of the major elements in the critique of revisionism
in the present study.

Chapter II

1. Randall, op. cit, I, p. 76. We omit annotating citations from
speeches of Lincobi and Douglas in this chapter, which presents
a concise synoptic impression of the two positions confronting each
other.

2. Ibid., p. 86.

3. Ibid., p. 122.

4. Ibid., p. 127.

5. Cf. Brooks Adams's introduction to Henry Adams, The Degradation
of the Democratic Dogma, (New York: Peter Smith, 1949), pp.
17-20.

Chapter 111

1. Nevin's denunciation of Douglas is chiefly in the second volume
of Ordeal of the Union, published in 1947 by Scribner. The sequel,
the third and fourth volumes of Ordeal of the Union, published
in 1950 under the subtitle Emergence of Lincoln, praises Douglas
as highly as he had earlier been denounced. We shall have occasion
below to comment on Nevin's differing criteria of statesmanship.

2. Op. cit., II, p. 108.

3- The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, (hereafter cited as
Collected Works) Roy P. Easier, editor (Rutgers University, 1953)*
I, pp. 178, 179. Unless otherwise noted, all italics in quotations from
Lincoln are Lincoln's own.

4- Winston S. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (London, 1932),
P- 39.

412 NOTES

5. Milton, op. cit, p. 150.

6. Congressional Globe, 3Oth Congress, ist Session, Appendix,
506-7.

7. Ibid., 3ist Cong., ist Session, Appendix, p. 365.

8. Cf. note 6 above.

9. The importance of the Irish to Douglas is indicated in Lincoln's
passing reference in 1852 to "those adopted citizens, whose votes
have given Judge Douglas all his consequence . . ." Collected
Works, II, p. 143. Cf. also Mr. Dooley on "The Negro Problem,"
in Mr. Dooley' s Philosophy (New York: R. H. Russell, 1900),
p. 218. "I was fr strikin' off the shackles iv th' slaves, me la-ad.
Twas thrue I didn't vote fr it, bein' that I heerd Stephen A.
Douglas say 'twas onconstitootional . . ."

10. Congressional Globe, 3 ist Congress, ist Session, Appendix, p. 371.

11. It was only the division of free soil votes between Fremont and
Fillmore that saved the Democrats from defeat in 1856.

Chapter IV

1. Douglas, we might observe, attempted, through the wise conduct
of party politics, to achieve what Calhoun wanted when he called
for the "concurrent majority." How much better was Douglas's pol-
icy, which would have attempted to secure the substance without
the offensive forml

2. Milton, op. cit, p. 155.

3. January 6, 1845: Congressional Globe, 28th Congress, 2nd Ses-
sion, Appendix, p. 95.

4. In the Senate, March 23, 1848. The Works of Daniel Webster
(Boston, 1860), V, p. 300.

5. W. E. Binkley, American Political Parties (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1947), p. 82.

6. Ibid., p. 121.

7. Collected Works, II, p. 323.

8. Ibid., IV, p. 86.

9. Cf. note 3 above.

10. Cf. Life of Stephen A. Douglas, by James W. Sheahan (New
York, 1860), p. 92.

11. Webster, Works, V, p. 289.

12. Ibid., I, pp. 355-57. Webster incorporated much of this passage
into his March 7, 1850, speech.

13. Randall, op. cit, H, pp. 29-31.

14. Webster, Works, III, p. 65.

15. Congressional Globe, 32nd Congress, ist Session, p. 70.

NOTES

16. Collected Works, I, p. 438.

17. Webster, Works, VI, pp. 494, 495.
i8 a . Collected Works, II, p. 276.

i8 b . But see also the "Resolutions in Behalf of Hungarian Freedom," re-
ported by Lincoln to an Illinois meeting, January 9, 1852. Collected
Works, II, p. 115. They include a denunciation of British oppres-
sion of Irish patriots, a denunciation which is reserved by com-
parison with Douglas's.

19. Sheahan, op. cit., p. 114.

20. Nevins, op. cit., I, p. 550.

21. Cf. A History of the Foreign Policy of the United States, by R. G.
Adams (New York: Macmillan, 1924), p. 233.

22. Nevins, op. cit, p. 551, n. 14.

23. Adams, op. cit, p. 231.

24. Sheahan, op. cit., pp. 105-8.

25. Ibid., pp. 113, 115.

26. Ibid., pp. 122, 123.

27. Ibid., p. 123.

28. Ibid., pp. 168-86. It is interesting and significant that Professor
Nevins, after quoting from this speech the passage we have cited
on p. 31, beginning "The civilized world have always held," goes
on to condemn Douglas in these words: "It was impossible for
such a man to comprehend the fervent emotion with which millions
of freedom loving Northerners regarded the possibility that half
the great West might become a land of slaves . . ." (Ordeal of the
Union, II, p. 108.) The significance lies in the fact that Nevins
should so single out this 1850 speech, which is the one speech
of Douglas that Lincoln praised highly. Cf. Lincoln, Collected
Works, II, p. 138: "... a very able production . . . comparing
favorably with anything from any source, which I had seen on
that general subject. The reading of it afforded me a good deal
of pleasure . . ." We would further note that, in this same speech,
in which he praises Douglas, Lincoln speaks of the error of those
who had attempted to stir up insurrection in Cuba against Spanish
rule. The heart of the error, Lincoln said, lay in the fact that the

Cubans were unfit for civil liberty, a statement which would suggest
a measure of agreement with the proposition of Douglas which
Nevins finds so unfeeling.

Chapter V

i. The Missouri Controversy, by Glover Moore (University of Ken-
tucky, 1953), p. 124.

414 NOTES

2. Congressional Globe, 28th Congress, 2nd Session, p. 284.

3. Ibid., 3ist Congress, ist Session, Appendix, p. 369.

4. Collected Works, II, pp. 262-63.

5. Cf. note 3 above.

6. Congressional Globe, 3ist Congress, ist Session, Appendix, p. 343.

7. Sheahan, op. cit, pp. 163-66.

Chapter VI

1. Ordeal of the Union, II, p. 100.

2. Ibid., p. 115.

3. Lincoln the President, I, p. 122.

4. Collected Works, II, p. 258.

5. Ibid., II, p. 257.

6. Op. cit., pp. 115-18.

7. Collected Works, II, p. 259.

8. Moore, op. cit., p. 251.

9. Democracy in America, Reeve-Bradley trans. (New York: Vintage,
1954 Books), Vol. I, pp. 61-63.

10. P. Orman Ray, The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise, 1909,
pp. 163 ff.

Chapter VII

1. Collected Works, II, p. 254.

2. Congressional Globe, 32nd Congress, 2nd Session, p. 1113.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., p. 1117.

5. Op. cit, p. 104.

6. Op. cit, p. 82.

7. Ibid., p. 81.

8. Congressional Globe, 32nd Congress, 2nd Session, p. 1117.

9. Webster Works, V, p. 340.

10. Ibid., p. 383.

11. Ibid.

12. Collected Works, III, p. 376.

13. Quoted by Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New
York: Knopf, 1942), p. 25.

14. The Supreme Court, before the Civil War, was very far from hav-
ing achieved the unique position it occupies today, as the judge of
the legality of the actions of the other two branches. Today it is
even held by some scholars that the Dred Scott decision was the

NOTES

first in which the Court ruled distinctly that a provision of a federal
statute violated the Constitution. But whether Dred Scott vs.
Sandford, or Marbury vs. Madison a half century before, was the
first, we should note that even in the case of Dred Scott the Court
did not declare the act of Congress unconstitutional until three
years after it had been declared "void" by Congress itself.
15. Moore, op. cit., pp. 124, 247.

Chapter VIII

1. Op. cit., II, p. 95.

2. Collected Works, II, p. 254.

3. Ibid., p. 261.

4. Op. cit, II, p. 95.

Chapter IX

1. Edmund Wilson, "Abraham Lincoln: The Union as Religious
Mysticism," in Eight Essays (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books,
1954 )> P- 202.

2. Ibid., p. 202.

3. Collected Works, IV, pp. 437, 438-39.

4. Ibid., I, p. 8.

5. Collected Works, I, p. 111.

6. Cf. Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, I, p. 220; and for the
entire episode, pp. 219-24.

7. Cf . Collected Works, I, p. 75.

8. Beveridge, op. cit., I, p. 195.

9. Letter to Erastus Coming and Others, June 12, 1863. Collected
Works, VI, p. 266.

10. Collected Works, III, pp. 547, 548, 549.

11. Op. cit, p. 190.

12. Jowett translation, pp. 483, 484.

13. Politics, 1284 a 3-20. Jowett translation.

14. This interpretation of Julius Caesar was suggested to me by Prof.
Leo Strauss.

15. See Lincoln's address at a Sanitary Fair in Baltimore, April 18,
1864. For an extremely interesting discussion of this address see
"The Dilemmas of Freedom," by Hans J. Morgenthau, and the
"Comment on Morgenthau's Dilemmas of Freedom," by Howard
B. White, in The American Political Science Review, September
1957. Our interpretation of the metaphor of the shepherd follows

416 NOTES

that of Professor White (p. 733), who locates its source not only
in the Bible but in Plato's Republic, 343 A ff., and Statesman,
271 E 6-8, and 275 B i ff. There is no evidence that Lincoln read
Plato, but that he knew that Plato was the source of some central
conceptions of Western thought is suggested by the following: "As
Plato had for the immortality of the soul, so Young America has
a 'pleasing hopea fond desirea longing after* territory," Works,
III, 357. The line occurs in Addison's Cato (Act V, Sc. i), but
Lincoln appears to have moved at his ease among ideas of the
Platonic tradition, particularly those infused into the Christian
tradition.

16. Collected Works, III, p. 334.

17. See Lincoln's praise of Douglas's 1850 Chicago speech defending
the Compromise of 1850, Works II, 138. Excerpt quoted above,
Ch. IV,n.28 (p. 442).

18. It will be observed that Lincoln has fully anticipated and in a
sense agrees with the revisionist thesis that the Civil War was a
"whipped-up crisis," the product of irresponsible leadership play-
ing upon irrational hopes and fears. But how far removed is Lin-
coln's diagnosis of this danger, almost a generation before the crisis
broke in all its fury, from the revisionist view of the war as
something eccentric, improbable, and unnecessary! Compare the
Lyceum speech's expectation of the moral-political crisis of Cae-
sarism, as something inherent in the attempt to demonstrate man's
capacity to govern himself, and the following: "That America, de-
voted to peace and busy with the affairs of a growing nation,
should have become a snarling area of internal conflict, however
voluminously explained, is a matter whose 'causes' seem uncon-
vincing. It happened; otherwise it would seem incredible." Randall,
op. cit, I, p. 75.

Chapter X

i. For present purposes we limit ourselves to this broad comparison
of the general approach to reverence by the Founding Fathers in
such a book as the Federalist which was praised as an authorita-
tive exposition of the principles of the Constitution by both
Washington and Jefferson with that of Lincoln. Two supplemen-
tary comments would, however, appear in order. First, the
awesome figure of Washington served, in the first eight years, to
produce the restraints which must flow, in the long run, from
reverence for the laws. Washington thus played a quasi-monarchial
role in the early days of the Republic, using a personal authority

NOTES

which was really greater than that of the law-which he certainly
could have overthrown had he so chosen-to establish the law.
Second, we would take cognizance of the notorious preference of
Hamilton for some of the aristocratic institutions of English
Whiggery to stabilize the democratic passions. The difference be-
tween Lincoln and Hamilton-his greatest intellectual predecessor
in the Federalist- Whig-Republican tradition-was that Lincoln
grasped the necessity of evolving aristocratic restraints upon
democracy, not by borrowing contra-democratic devices from
a non-democratic past, but by evolving them from within the
democratic ethos as perfections of that ethos.

2. Federalist, $51, Modern Library edition, p. 337.

3. Ibid., #49, p. 331.

4. Cf. note 2 above.

5. Collected Works, I, p. 382.

6. The Complete Jefferson, assembled and arranged by Saul K.
Padover (New York: Duell Sloan & Pearce, 1943), p. 675.

7. Ibid., p. 677.

8. Ibid., p. 675.

9. Ibid., p. 676.

10. Cf. note 7 above.

11. Compare Jefferson's remark to this effect in Query XVIII (Padover
ed., p. 677).

12. P. 324.

13. A fellow Whig, but rival for political preferment, although a
personal friend. Lincoln named his second child after him.

14. It is worth noticing how "time" was a motif in Lincoln's rhetoric
from early years. It is, of course, the key to many of the profoundest
effects of both the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural.

15. Compare the following double-entendre: "Whether or not the
world would be vastly benefitted by a total and final banishment
from it of all intoxicating drinks, seems to me not now to be an
open question. Three-fourths of mankind confess the affirmative
with their tongues, and, I believe, all the rest acknowledge it in
their hearts" Apart from the possibility that the "now" may be
meant in the most literal sense viz., in the presence of the
Washingtonians there is the horrible suspicion that three fourths
do not acknowledge it in their hearts. Here, as elsewhere through-
out this chapter, all italics in quotations from Lincoln are Lincoln's
own.

16. The difference between a God who cannot and one who will not
reverse himself has, of course, well-nigh unlimited ramifications.
How far Lincoln was aware of these, we do not venture to say.
However, Lincoln does say, in a later passage which must be dis-
cussed in its proper place, that the argument for Providence, like

418 NOTES

that for whisky, rests upon universal public opinion. Now it is
precisely because the philosophic God is subject to ontological
necessity that he cannot be conceived as changing and hence
cannot be conceived as "Providence" i.e., concerned with particu-
lar beings or particular events. For this reason He could not change
his "decree," while the biblical God could (and frequently did).
Moreover, the argument for a God whose "decree" is subject to
necessity would be an ontological argument, not an argument
from universal public opinion.

It may be objected that we are laying too great stress upon
the distinction between "can" and "will" and that, in any case,
there is no necessity for conceiving the two conceptions of deity
in the form of a radical opposition. In Thomistic theology, for
example, the antinomy is overcome by the proposition that all ap-
parent "reversals" of the divine fiat are themselves predetermined
by an aboriginal necessity. Without inquiring whether the Tho-
mistic synthesis is philosophically successful, I think it clear that
Lincoln's language is inconsistent with such a synthesis. For the
Thomistic doctrine, while holding that the divine reversals are ap-
parent rather than real, denies to human wisdom the possibility
of penetrating to its core the necessity of the divine nature,
anticipating thereby all future reversals. Revelation remains a
necessity of human life precisely because central facts concerning
human life e.g., man's sinfulness and the remedy therefore are
beyond unassisted human reason. From the Thomistic view, there-
fore, Lincoln would have had no basis to assert as a matter of
natural knowledge that the strength of the passions would always
remain the same. Since Lincoln does assert this as a matter of
natural knowledge, he must have here presupposed only a natural
theology. And from the point of view of a natural theology, the
force of the opposition of the two conceptions of deity recurs in
full

17. It is advisable that the reader consult the analytical outline of the
Temperance Address which we have prepared for a precise under-
standing of our references to sections and subsections. We have,
where convenient, given in parentheses the numbers of the para-
graphs comprehended in a given section.

18. See fifth paragraph of the address, which has not been quoted.

19. "I was at the door of the church as the people passed out," records
the faithful Herndon, "and heard them discussing the speech . . .
'It's a shame/ I heard one man say, 'that he should be permitted
to abuse us so in the house of the Lord/ The truth was the
[Washingtonian] society was composed mainly of the roughs and
drunkards of the town, who had evinced a desire to reform. Many

NOTES

of them were too fresh from the gutter to be taken at once into
the society of such people as worshipped at the church where the
speech was delivered . . . The whole thing, I repeat, was damag-
ing to Lincoln, and gave rise to the opposition on the part of the
churches which confronted him several years afterwards when he
became a candidate against the noted Peter Cartwright for Con-
gress." Beveridge, op. cit., I, p. 329, n. 2.

20. Collected Works, III, p. 376.

21. It might be argued that, in presenting objections to Lincoln's ar-
gument, we are producing a hybrid mixture of interpretation and
critique. Whether this is so or not depends upon whether or not
certain criticisms of his overt argument were intended by Lincoln
to be made by the intelligent addressee of his speech. When the
criticism required by the manifest deficiencies of Lincoln's argu-
ment correspond heavily with the defects which he has openly
imputed to the position of others, we may be permitted to suspect
that Lincoln was as conscious as we are of such weaknesses in
his reasonings. If this is so, we are entitled to think that Lincoln
also had a covert argument which transcends these difficulties and
that it is this argument which is the true aim of interpretation. To
discover this argument requires that we supply, by means of such
criticism as the foregoing, the intermediate premises lacking in Lin-
coln's explicit exposition.

22. Lincoln's expression in a somewhat different context See paragraph
ten of the address.

23. We might notice Lincoln's equally spurious argument that non-
drinkers should take the pledge so as to make the refusal to take
the pledge as unfashionable as wearing one's wife's bonnet in
church. The idea of thus turning "temperance" into a fashion would
mean, of course, to deprive it of any inner moral significance. The
morally indifferent example chosen by Lincoln indicates this. How
this would contribute to real temperance may be gathered from
the experience of another President. Harry S. Truman, in his
memoirs, tells of working in a drugstore as a boy. The local
temperance leaders regularly trooped into the store for their ma-
tutinal medicine on the way to work. Truman said he learned then
and there to prefer the barroom drinkers to the prescription-counter
drinkers. I doubt that Lincoln, whose proposal here amounts to
turning thousands into prescription-counter drinkers, would have
disagreed.

24. The foregoing reflection requires this further comment. Men of
"genius and generosity" may have a proneness to intemperance i.e.,
to self-indulgence in the broader sense (not only with respect to
drink) -but they also have a "temptation" to virtue that lesser men

420 NOTES

do not have. Let us consider female virtue, by way of analogy.
A beautiful woman is subject, no doubt, to temptations that an
ugly one does not have. But it is also true that the pleasure she
gives by her beauty gains advantages for her that an ugly woman
may not have at all or may have only at a sacrifice that the
beauty need not make. Similarly, men of genius and generosity,
having access to noble pleasures, have less need of ignoble ones.
It would be truer to say that they have less temptation to ignoble
pleasures but that, if they do turn to them, they will do so with
far more force and vehemence. But this, it seems, leads to an
opposite conclusion from Lincoln's: society should be harsher to the
man of talents who forgoes noble for ignoble pleasures; increasing
the penalty of moral failure will strengthen the resolve for success.
With the same inner (and valid) logic, it also appears, society has
always penalized more harshly the unchastity of beautiful women.

25. See the discussion of heroic virtue in my Thomism and Aristoteli-
anism (University of Chicago, 1952), pp. 98 ff.

26. This reflection suggests that the Washingtonians might have been
a convenient symbol of early Christianity, which must also have
been assembled largely from the outcasts of the society of its
period. Such at least is suggested by the idea that in the kingdom
of heaven the last shall be first, etc., not to mention the social
and moral standing of most of those to whom Jesus addressed his
Gospel. Lincoln's attack on the old-school reformers in like manner
calls to mind the attack of the early Protestants upon the pomp
and intolerance of Rome. That the old-school reformers were the
lineal descendants of the early Protestants may perhaps give us
a supplementary insight into the probable fate of the Washingto-
nian movement, from Lincoln's point of view, should it continue
on the path Lincoln discerned, as an organized political force.

27. We might observe this difference, which undoubtedly underlies the
common-sense distinction between the pledge taken by the Wash-
ingtonians and the "pledge" which gains entrance into the kingdom
of heaven. It is presumed, we take it, that the blessed have such
enjoyment from their blessedness there that temptation to sin is
inconceivable in the celestial abode (bypassing the question
of whether the passions of the body are even possible in heaven).
Unfortunately this is not the case of the Washingtonians, so that
a sober community dignitary who joined could not be absolutely
sure that it was a "reformed" drunkards' society he was joining.

28. The evidence for this statement is not indubitable, as the proof
of a negative never is. Roy P. Basler, in his one-volume edition
of Lincoln's Writing and Speeches, p. 129, says, "It is not certain
that Lincoln was ever a member of the organization." To which
we would add the observation that Lincoln, in the Temperance

NOTES

Address, says that the whole purpose of teetotalers like himself
joining is the value of their public example. From the point of
view of this argument, not to be notoriously a member would be
tantamount to not being a member at all. However, there is in
addition a direct statement (in Beveridge, op. cit, II., pp. 241,
242) reported of Lincoln himself, although many years after the
speech.

A decanter of "red liquor/' . . . stood on the sideboard, and,
as the usual act of politeness of former days, Douglas invited
callers to have a drink if they wished. "Mr. Lincoln, won't
you take something," Douglas is reported to have said when
Lincoln rose to go. "No, I think not," said Lincoln. "Why!
are you a member of the Temperance Society?" asked Doug-
las. "No! I am not a member of any Temperance Society,"
Lincoln answered, "but I am temperate in this, that I don't
drink anything."

29. The moral "leveling" which is the object of Lincoln's satire in these
passages is characteristic of the utopianism so strong in the
nineteenth century. The abolition of "artificial" distinctions by the
French Revolution, so that "citizen" became a greater title of
honor than king or lord, lay behind this utopianism. But the term
"citizen" was still parochial by comparison with the term "com-
rade," whose history in 1842 was still largely before it. That
communism sprang from the same soil as the temperance move-
ment should be obvious from much of this chapter.

30. Whether by rotation in office, as in classical times, or as the voter
in a modern democracy "rules" on election day and is ruled
thereafter.

Chapter XI

1. Emergence of Lincoln, II, p. 463.

2. Ibid., I, pp. 347, 348.

3. Emergence of Lincoln, I, p. 362.

4. Randall, op. cit., p. 116.

5. The house divided speech, June 16, 1858, is to be found in
Collected Works, II, pp. 461-69. No further footnote references to
it will be given.

6. Randall, op. cit., I, p. 108.

7. Nevins, op. cit., I, p. 362.

8. Ibid.

9. Compare also the following from Nevins's appendix on the respon-

422 NOTES

sibility of Curtis and McLean for the Dred Scott decision: "It
remains to say a few words about President-elect Buchanan's
intervention. While no 'conspiracy' was concocted between him and
Taney, he did let key members of the Court know just what kind
of decision he wanted, and just why he wanted it ... He moved
the hesitant Grier to act ... He had always taken a realistic
view of the bench. He had long thought that politics should govern
it." Emergence of Lincoln, II, p. 477. Among the definitions given
by Webster of "conspiracy" is the following: "Combination of men
for a single end; a concurrence or general tendency, as of circum-
stances, to one event; harmonious action." We believe the candid
reader will find sufficient evidence to support Lincoln's conspiracy
charge in this sense of "conspiracy." Nevins and Randall have re-
jected Lincoln's charge in its legal sense, in which sense it was
never meant. Lincoln's rhetoric is deliberative, not forensic. Its
forensic quality is metaphorical; he was, after all, a lawyer. But
he is not trying to convict of crime; he is attempting to convince
the people that they cannot entrust their liberties to the Democratic
Party of Taney, Pierce, Buchanan, and Douglas. For such men
had collaborated in the "harmonious action" implied by the agree-
ment of the purposes of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott
decision, and the other circumstances he elaborates. His charge was
never intended to impute guilty purposes in the legal sense. He
could not have intended this, since legal conspiracy means an in-
tention to violate the law, and these men were law makers.

10. Op. cit, I, p. 362.

11. Italics not in the original.

12. Moore, op. cit, p. 124.

13. Collected Works, III, p. 527.

14. Italics not hi the original.

15. That the re-enactment of the Northwest Ordinance, including the
slavery prohibition, must have been regarded contemporaneously
as an exertion of ordinary legislative power by Madison, Washing-
ton, et al., is sufficiently demonstrated in Curtis's disserting opin-
ion.

16. Collected Works, III, pp. 230-31.

17. Ibid., p. 231.

18. Collected Works, III, p. 43.

19. Ibid., p. 54.

20. Emergence of Lincoln, I, p. 362.

21. Lincoln the President, I, p. 116.

22. University of Chicago Law Review, Autumn 1954.

23. Ibid., p. 142, n. 266.

24. Ibid., p. 142.

NOTES 423

Chapter XII

1. Collected Works, II, p. 518.

2. Nevins, Emergence of Lincoln, I, p. 165.

3. Randall, op. cit, I, p. 124. Our italics.

4. Lincoln developed this argument most fully in his July 17, 1858,
speech. Collected Works, II, pp. 504 ff.

5. Ibid., p. 509.

6. The English bill which submitted the Lecompton Constitution to
Kansas on August 2, 1858, itself contained an enormous bribe of
public lands if the slave constitution were adopted. Men who did
not care deeply about slavery and freedom were not apt to have
voted as those Kansans did. And it is idle to think that their support
by a national party committed to the federal prohibition of slavery
in the territories did not affect their caring.

7. The sufficiency of the Republican party as a cause assumes that
the Republicans' growing strength made Douglas's break with
Buchanan both possible and necessary. Although the Republicans
outnumbered Douglas men five to one in the showdown on
Lecompton in the House, they did not have enough votes in the
35th Congress to defeat it by themselves alone.

8. Op. cit, I, p. 127.

Chapter XIII

1. Collected Works, II, p. 180.

2. Ibid., II, p. 278.

3. Ibid., p. 532.

Chapter XIV

1. Lincoln the President, I, pp. 121, 122.

2. Collected Works, II, p. 385.

3. Ibid., Ill, p. 27.

4. Ibid., pp. 225, 226.

5. Ibid., II, p. 264.

6. Ibid., Ill, p. 445.

7. Ibid., pp. 301, 302.

8. Ibid., II, pp. 405, 406. Most of this passage was quoted by Lincoln
in the Alton debate, ibid., Ill, p. 301.

9. Ibid., II, p. 501.
10. Ibid., p. 407.

424 NOTES

11. Ibid., Ill, pp. 303, 304.

12. Ibid., II, p. 520.

13. Ibid., Ill, p. 204.

14. Ibid., II, p. 406.

15. Jefferson never remained wholly Lockean. There are passages e.g.,
in his letter to John Adams, October 28, 1823 in which he speaks
of a natural aristocracy and that man is "formed for the social
state," which would seem to premise a rejection of the whole
egalitarian-state-of-nature theory. It is hard to tell whether such
departures are purely ad hominem or whether Jefferson simply was
unable to make up his mind.

16. Emergence of Lincoln, I, p. 392.

17. Collected Works, I, p. 438.

18. Compare Lincoln's letter to Herndon, February 15, 1848, especially
the following: "The provision of the Constitution giving the war-
making power to Congress, was dictated as I understand it, by
the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and im-
poverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not
always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our
convention understood to be the most oppressive of kingly oppres-
sions . . ." Tom Paine's Rights of Man is the most famous popular
statement of this view of the relation of monarchies and republics.

19. Cf. above, p. 257.

20. Thus Jefferson, in the aforesaid query XVIII, Notes on Virginia:
"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual
exercise of the most boisterous passions . . . This quality is the

germ of all education in him . . . The man must be a prodigy
who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such cir-
cumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be
loaded, who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on
the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these
into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor
patriae of the other . . ." This is an amazing statement for many
reasons, perhaps most for the reference to slaves as citizens. Yet
Jefferson never wavered in his insistence that these "citizens" should
be deported as a price of their freedom. Consider, however, the
classic counterpart to the foregoing, from Burke's speech on con-
ciliation with American, paragraph 42: ". . .in Virginia and the
Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the
case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the
most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not
only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege ... I do
not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment,
which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but . . . The

NOTES

fact is so: and these people of the southern colonies are much
more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, at-
tached to liberty, than those to the northward." Although Burke
and Jefferson do not flatly contradict each other for Burke
reserves the difference between pride and virtue yet the tendency
of their evaluations is clearly opposite. Needless to say, the evalua-
tion of the British statesman is the one that became the dominant
conviction in the South. Lincoln, of course, accepted fully Jeffer-
son's views in the eighteenth queryexcept for its optimistic con-
clusion about the spirit of the master abating, which we have
noted above to be a non sequitur.

21. For an authoritative exposition of Hobbesian and Lockean natural-
right doctrine, with particular reference to the respective roles of
reason and passion, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History
(Chicago, 1953), especially Chapter V, "Modern Natural Right."

22. For Lincoln's reasoning, implicit and explicit, concerning the
"rights" in the passions, see the discussion of political and social
equality below, Chapter XVII.

Chapter XV

1. The soul is the form of the body, hence its formal cause. The
function of the soul i.e., rational activity is the final cause. Strictly
speaking, not the principle "all men are created equal," but the
activity which it engenders, the activity arising from the hope it
plants in the hearts of all, is the final cause of the American polity.
We have not attempted a more precise explication of Aristotle's
doctrine of causality or of its application to Lincoln's language
than seemed necessary for the use herein made of it.

2. Collected Works, IV, p. 168.

3. Ibid., II, p. 385.

4. Douglas at Chicago, July 9, 1858. In Created Equal? The Complete
Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, edited by Paul M. Angle (Uni-
versity of Chicago, 1958), p. 18.

5. From the Peoria speech: "Finally, I insist that if there is ANY-
THING which it is the duty of the WHOLE PEOPLE to never
entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation
and perpetuity, of their own liberties, and institutions. And if they
shall think, as I do, that the extension of slavery endangers them,
more than any, or all other causes, how recreant to themselves,
if they submit the question, and with it, the fate of their country,
to a mere handful of men [i.e., the early settlers in the territories
who, according to Douglas's doctrine, would decide the issue for

426 NOTES

all who would come after], bent only on temporary self-interest."

6. Collected Works, II, p. 2,2,2,.

7. Ibid., Ill, p. 93.

8. Ibid., p. 204.

9. Ibid., II, p. 271.

10. Ibid., Ill, p. 10.

11. Ibid., II, p. 132.

12. Ibid., I, p. 347.

13. Ibid., II, p. 130.

Chapter XVI

1. Collected Works, II, pp. 265, 266.

2. Ibid., Ill, p. 267.

3. Cf. p. 202.

4. Collected Works, III, p. 318. Douglas had maintained in 1850 that
slave property was like any other property with which a citizen
of the United States migrated to a territory; viz., it was subject
to local law. Banks, whisky, and slaves were three different things
which had been prohibited by local territorial laws somewhere and
at sometime, and there was no more reason for slaveholders to
complain of the exclusion of slaves than for liquor owners to com-
plain of the exclusion of liquor. In 1858 he modified this to the
extent that he said that slaves might be "regulated" like any other
property by local law. Lincoln made merry with this equivocation:
what kind of "regulating" is it that totally destroys die enjoyment
and thereby the value of the property? Douglas's position was
sound in 1850 when he insisted that slaves were incident to the
same liabilities as other property, but the Dred Scott decision, by
asserting that the right to property in slaves was affirmed in the
Constitution, placed it on a totally different footing from other
property. "All property is based upon local law," says Professor
Hodder (op. cit, p. 19) in rejecting Taney's assertion of a property
right asserted within the federal Constitution. Douglas could
then not assimilate the obligation to protect slave property to that
of other property without rejecting Taney's opinion. As long as he
refused to do this, Lincoln's analogy of Taney's supposed right with
that of the fugitive-slave clause held.

5. Ibid., Ill, p. 417.

6. We omit, as immaterial to the point under discussion, the distinc-
tion between territories owned originally and territories acquired
after 1787.

NOT1*

7. Ibid., II, p. 407.

8. Ibid., p. 499.

9. Ibid., Ill, p. 10. We may wonder at some other implications of
Douglas's denial of the brotherhood of man.

Chapter XVII

1. Lincoln the President, I, p. 122.

2. New York: Knopf, pp. 93-136. First published as a trade edition
and reprinted three times. Reprinted as a Vintage paperback edi-
tion in 1954, and reprinted in this edition six times by March 1957.
From the present writer's experience, it is the main source from
which college students today are imbibing their opinions concern-
ing Lincoln.

3. Collected Works, III, p. 221.

4. Ibid., p. 248.

5. Ibid., pp. 249, 250.

6. Cf.p.46.

7. Collected Works, II, p. 501.

8. Ibid., Ill, pp. 384, 386.

9. Ibid., II, p. 320.

10. New York: Harper, 1944.

11. Collected Works, II, p. 266.

12. Randall, op. cit., I, p. 123.

13. Collected Works, III, p. 303.

14. Ibid., II, pp. 255, 256, 281, 282.

15. Ibid., Ill, p. 16.

16. There is no evidence that Lincoln assigned intrinsic importance to
the color difference. But Jefferson did, as the following remarks

indicate: "And is this difference [viz., of color] of no importance?
Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the
two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expres-
sions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the
one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the
countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers the
emotions of the other race? Add to these . . . their own judgment
in favor of the whites, declared by their preference of them . . ."
Padover ed., p. 622. The last-mentioned point namely, that the
blacks as well as the whites preferred the color white suggests that
if color as a basis for evaluating human worth is a prejudice, it is
so universal a prejudice that it must be counted politically, so
long as the opinions of non-philosophers are to have political
weight; i.e., always.

NOTES

17. Again let us hear Jefferson: "The improvement of the blacks in
body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites,
has been observed by everyone, and proves that their inferiority
is not the effect of their condition of life." And further: "I advance
it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally
a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are
inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.
It is not against experience to suppose that different species of the
same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different
qualifications." Padover, pp. 663, 664, 665.

18. Padover, p. 665.

19. Ibid., p. 661.

20. Cf.p. 245.

Chapter XVIII

1. Randall, op. cit., I, p. 127.

2. Cf. Americans Interpret Their Civil War, by Thomas J. Pressly
(Princeton University, 1954), pp. 244-46. The quotation from
Ramsdell in this paragraph is taken from Pressly, p. 245.

3. Cf.p. 165.

4. New Mexico and the Sectional Controversy, 1846-1861, by L. M.
Ganaway (University of New Mexico, 1944), p. 66.

5. Ibid., p. 72.

6. Collected Works, III, p. 316.

7. New York: Knopf, 1956.

8. Op. cit., pp. 60, 62.

9. Ibid., pp. 63, 64.

10. Ibid., p. 65.

11. Collected Works, IV, p. 24.

12. Cf.p. 59.

13. Collected Works, II, pp. 409, 410.

14. Ibid., IV, p. 16.

15. Ibid., HI, p. 323.

Chapter XIX

1. The italics are Hofstadter's.

2. Lincoln the President, 1, p. 126.

3. Ibid., pp. 229, 230.

4. Boston: D. C. Heath & Company, 1937, pp. 202, 203.

NOTES

5. Collected Works, IV, p. 150.

6. Ibid., p. 155.

7. Randall, Civil War and Reconstruction, p. 232.

8. P. 136.

Chapter XX

1. Collected Works, III, pp. 54, 55.

2. Ibid., p. 235.

3. Angle, op. cit., pp. 64, 65.

*
Appendices

Appendix I

Some of the Historical Background to the Lin-
colnDouglas Debates

THE Lincoln-Douglas debates are quite naturally identified, above
all, with the seven joint debates of the summer and fall of 1858,
which were the most sensational feature of the great senatorial
campaign. And yet if we attend to the actual dialectical ex-
changes, the joint debates will be seen to be only a part of a much
longer series of argumentative encounters. For the beginning of
this larger debate we must go back to the Illinois state fair in
Springfield in the first week of October 1854.' Douglas spoke there
on the third of the month, reviewing his arguments, now familiar
to the whole country, defending the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which
had become law the previous spring and which had, by the repeal
of the Missouri Compromise, renewed the pro- and anti-slavery
convulsions of the year 1850. Lincoln replied to this speech on
the following day, October 4, 1854. The same speech was repeated
by Lincoln on the evening of the sixteenth of the month at Peoria,
Illinois, where Douglas had spoken in the afternoon. It is from the
text delivered at Peoria that the printed version was taken, and
for this reason it has passed into history as the Peoria speech. It
is the longest of all Lincoln's pre-presidential speeches and a more
complete statement of his position in the controversy with Doug-
las than is to be found in any other single deliverance. It is
noteworthy that he frequently quoted from it, and more fre-
quently paraphrased it, in the joint debates, and it is the primary
source for an understanding of Lincoln's position throughout the
period 1854-61.' Of the great Lincoln speeches which precede the
campaign of 1858, the next in importance to the Peoria speech
is the one on the Dred Scott decision. It, too, was delivered
in Springfield, June 26, 1857. But it, too, is a direct reply to a
speech Douglas had made in the same place two weeks earlier,
when Lincoln had as was his customsat in Douglas's audience.

APPENDICES

The house divided speech, which formally began the senatorial
jontest on June 16, 1858, was delivered to the convention which
had just resolved that "Abraham Lincoln is the first and only
choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate,
as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas." Both resolution and
speech were unprecedented in a number of ways, not least be-
cause senators were then elected by joint sessions of the state
legislature, and such electioneering as went on usually took place
in the halls of the legislature after the election of its members.
By making the choice of United States senator an issue in the
general election, the Illinois Republicans initiated the first long
step toward the Seventeenth Amendment. On July 9, 1858,
Douglas returned to Chicago from Washington, where he had
been delayed several weeks after the Congress had adjourned.
With Lincoln seated beside him on the balcony of the Tremont
House he delivered a fiery reply to the house divided speech.
From the same balcony, on the very next evening Douglas having
already left Chicago Lincoln retorted in a speech whose perora-
tion was, and is, among the most moving of his many invocations
of the Declaration of Independence. From Chicago both orators
moved again toward Springfield. On July 16 Douglas spoke at
Bloomington. Again Lincoln was present. On the seventeenth
Douglas delivered substantially the same speech in Springfield.
Lincoln was not in the audience this time; but the reason, it
may be supposed, is that he was busy at the time preparing
his third major speech of the campaign, which rebutted Douglas's
Bloomington speech and which he delivered in the evening of
the same July 17 in the State House in Springfield.

Less than a week later, on July 24, 1858, began the corre-
spondence, which shortly concluded in the arrangements for the
seven joint debates. Lincoln issued the challenge, and Douglas
named the times and places as follows:

1. Ottawa, La Salle County August 2ist

2. Freeport, Stephenson County August 27th

3. Jonesboro, Union County September i$th

4. Charleston, Coles County September i8th

5. Galesburg, Knox County October 7 th

6. Quincy, Adams County October 13*

7. Alton, Madison County October i$th

432 APPENDICES

The idea was, as Douglas put it, to choose "one prominent point
in each Congressional District in the State, except the Second and
Sixth districts, where we have both spoken." There is a curious
footnote to history in a postscript to Lincoln's letter to Douglas
of July 29, 1858, the letter in which he acknowledges Douglas's
formal agreement to the proposal to have joint meetings. "As mat-
ters now stand, I shall be at no more of your exclusive meetings."
Douglas and his managers were extremely annoyed at Lincoln's
habit of turning up at Douglas's rallies and then inviting the
$ame crowd to return later to hear him!

The procedure at the joint debates was for one man to open,
speaking for exactly one hour a timekeeper being present, just
as at a boxing match. His opponent would then reply for an
hour and a half. Finally the man who opened would have the
rebuttal for half an hour. Douglas opened and closed at Ottawa,
Jonesboro, Galesburg, and Alton; Lincoln at Freeport, Charleston,
and Quincy. Since there were seven debates, one man had to
have the advantage on rebuttals, but it is doubtful that, in such a
long series of exchanges, there was any unfairness to Lincoln
in this. He, being the lesser known man, certainly gained more
from the mere fact of the joint meetings.

The colorful descriptions of the debates in Carl Sandburg's
Prairie Years and in other volumes too numerous to mention need
not be added to here. Suffice it to say that the atmosphere for
each debate resembled that of the day of the Big Game in any
American college town of today. To quote from the Chicago Press
and Tribune coverage of the first debate: "Ottawa was deluged
in dust ... At eight o'clock [the speaking began at 2:30 P.M.]
the avenues leading from the country were so enveloped with
dust that the town resembled a vast smoke house. Teams, trains,
and processions poured in from every direction like an army with
banners. National flags, mottoes and devices fluttered and stared
from every street corner. Military companies and bands of music
monopolized the thoroughfares around the court house and the
public square. Two brass twelve pounders banged away in the
centre of the city and drowned the hubbub of the multitude
with their own higher capacities for hubbub. Vanity Fair never
boiled with madder enthusiasm." At Ottawa the crowd was es-
timated at about 12,000, at Freeport still more. The smallest
crowd, about 1500, was at Jonesboro, a little town 350 miles south
of Chicago. Galesburg is estimated to have furnished a crowd

APPENDICES

larger than any that preceded it At Alton, the last debate, 4000
to 5000 were said to be present. It must be remembered that
these were open-air affairs, with no accommodations during the
three hours of speaking other than the ground upon which the
audience stood. And there was just about every kind of weather
-the blazing sun at Ottawa, rain at Freeport, and some chill
days for the October debates. It was both spectacle and event
that fastened the eyes of the fanners of Illinois upon these
protagonists, a spectacle and event that must continue to fas-
cinate every reflective observer of the drama of popular govern-
ment.

Behind the Lincoln-Douglas debates are a series of famous
compromises, once familiar to every schoolboy. First, of course,
there are the compromises concerning slavery in the United
States Constitution. Of these, the third clause of Article I, Section
2, says that "Representatives and direct taxes shall be appor-
tioned among the several States . . . according to their respective
Number, which shall be determined by adding to the whole
Number of free persons . . . three-fifths of all other persons."
This "three-fifths" clause, which caused the representation of the
slave states in the lower house of Congress to be increased in
the ratio of three "persons" for every five slaves, came to be a
particular sore point, not only because of its obvious unfairness
from the point of view of representative democracy, but because
subsequent developments destroyed its character as a compro-
mise. Originally the clause intended to increase both represen-
tation and liability to direct taxes by the three-fifths ratio. Because
of the aversion of Jeffersonians and Jacksonians to direct taxes,
however, the liability aspect dropped almost completely from
view. When the northern states abolished slavery and the South
sought to extend it to new territories, this clause became a thorn
in the side of the free states that the Founders could hardly
have anticipated.

In addition, the Constitution of 1787 provided that the impor-
tation of slaves from abroad might not be prohibited before
1808. This clause (the first of Article I, Section 9) was a com-
promise between the demand for outright prohibition and the
demand for an outright denial of a power to prohibit the foreign

434 APPENDICES

slave trade. It represents a much more positive anti-slavery bias
in the men who wrote the Constitution than might appear today
on its face. For if Negro slaves, as Taney was to assert in 1857,
were considered in 1787 as mere articles of commerce, to be
bought and sold as ordinary merchandise, it is hardly conceivable
that the trade in them should be so distinguished and set apart
from the "Commerce with foreign Nations** which, in the third
clause of Section 8 (of Article I), it is said that Congress shall
have power to "regulate."

The so-called "fugitive slave" clause of the Constitution (the
third of Article IV, Section 2) does not, as often noted, mention
slaves at all. ( See page 290. ) We can hardly regard it as a com-
promise of the Constitution, since there seems to have been no
significant opposition in 1787 to the inclusion of such a provision.
All responsible men were then agreed that, however contrary to
abstract justice slavery might be, to the extent that it constituted
property according to positive law, it must be protected. No
matter how favorable men like Washington or Jefferson might
be to gradual emancipation, to encourage slaves to escape was
not thought by them to be a defensible method to accomplish it.

Of the political measures dealing with slavery, the Missouri
Compromise is, of course, one which students of the debates must
keep constantly in mind. In actual fact, however, there were two
compromises in the course of the settlement of the Missouri
question. When the territory of Missouri applied for permission
to frame a state constitution early in 1819 there were eleven free
and eleven slave states. To a bill enabling Missouri to become
a state a New York congressman proposed an amendment that, in
effect, would have provided for the gradual abolition of slavery
in Missouri. The amendment passed the House but was defeated
in the Senate, and all action on Missouri's application was stale-
mated for the session amid violent controversy. When Congress
again met, in December 1819^ Maine was requesting admission
as a free state, and a way out of the impasse appeared. In its
final form the first Missouri Compromise saw Maine admitted
to the Union and an enabling act for the admission of Missouri
as a slave state, with a provision in the act that, in the remainder
of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36'so", slavery should be
"forever" prohibited.

On the basis of the March 1820 enabling act Missouri held a

APPENDICES 435

convention which drafted a constitution, with which it then ap-
plied for admission. But this constitution empowered the legis-
lature to exclude free Negroes and mulattoes from the state.
When it was presented to Congress another storm broke, for
sentiment in the free states was strongly convinced that such a
provision contravened Article IV, Section 2, of the Constitution,
which says, "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all
Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States." And
free Negroes and mulattoes indubitably possessed privileges of
citizenship under the constitutions of free states. It was the
stumbling block of this free Negro provision of Missouri's con-
stitution which required the second Missouri Compromise. And
it was this compromise of which Henry Clay was the moving
spirit and which his conciliatory skill in Congress produced. By it
Clay secured support for Missouri's admission whenever Missouri
would give a satisfactory pledge that nothing in her constitution
should be interpreted to abridge the privileges and immunities
of citizens of the United States. This pledge Missouri soon gave,
without repealing the offensive clause in her constitution, and
was admitted to the Union. In short, the second Missouri Compro-
mise was a face-saving form of words which enabled the original
compromise to take effect. It was of no consequence with respect
to the power of Missouri (or any other state) to discriminate
against free Negroes as much as it pleased.

In 1836 the creation of the Republic of Texas, by a successful
revolution against Mexico, initiated the long struggle for Texas's
annexation to the United States, a struggle consummated by
Texas's entry into the Union in the summer of 1845. Although
the phrase "manifest destiny" made its appearance only in 1845,
throughout the nine years that the annexation of Texas was de-
bated it became increasingly well understood that the extension
of both slavery and the Union, over the vast and (by white men)
largely unoccupied lands of North America owned by Mexico,
was indirectly at stake. The Mexican War, which followed the
annexation of Texas and which was the expected and virtually
certain consequence of it, then added the great regions to the
Union which were to precipitate the territorial issues thence-
forward to dominate American politics until the Civil War.

The genesis of the Civil War was seen, above all, in the con-
troversy concerning the Wilmot Proviso. This famed measure

436 APPENDICES

came soon after hostilities with Mexico began. President Polk
requested $2,000,000 from Congress to be used in peace negotia-
tionsnegotiations in which "purchase" would underwrite con-
quest in wresting California and the other Mexican provinces
manifestly destined for the Stars and Stripes. To a bill to appro-
priate this sum, moved in the House August 8, 1846, David
Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, offered an amendment which
"provided, that, as an express and fundamental condition to the
acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the
United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated
between them, and to the use of the moneys herein appropriated,
neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any
part of said territory . . ." The bill with Wilmot's amendment
passed the House by a vote of 87 to 64 after a bitter debate in
which all efforts to water it down e.g., by limiting its prohibi-
tions to lands north of 36'so" were beaten. It died, however, in
the Senate. But the next Congress, the one in which Abraham
Lincoln was a little known member, revived the Proviso in a
multitude of guises, and it was repeatedly supported by large
majorities in the House and as repeatedly rejected in the Senate.
The point contended for by the Wilmot Proviso, and endorsed
again and again by the representatives of a large majority of
the American people, was, however, defeated by the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, February
2, 1848. This treaty was approved by the Senate, where the
Proviso was always unpopular, and it secured the Mexican prov-
inces without any restriction as to slavery. The collaboration of
the Senate, in which the interests of slavery were vastly over-
represented, and the President in defeating the will of the "direct
representatives of the people" was a lesson deeply impressed upon
the free-soil North. And the breaking up of old party lines, in
the support of the Proviso, foreshadowed the Republican party
of the next decade.

At the end of the Mexican War, as before the Missouri contro-
versy, the number of free and slave states there were now fifteen
of each was equal. Thus the application of California in 1849
for admission, with a constitution forbidding slavery, again fanned
into violent conflagration the passions aroused by the Wilmot
Proviso. The Nashville Convention, summoned at the behest of
John C. Calhoun, attempted to lay down as a southern ultimatum

APPENDICES 437

the doctrine that Congress had no power to exclude slaveowners
from going into any of the national territories with their peculiar
property, but that, on the contrary, Congress had a duty to
protect the rights of the owners of slaves. Although the Convention
expressed a willingness to compromise by extending the Missouri
line to the Pacific, it also threatened secession as the alternative
to a satisfactory settlement. Against this background the Compro-
mise of 1850 was thrashed out in the spring and summer of that
year. Because of it, but perhaps only because of it, the threat
of secession proved abortive. The program of the Nashville
Convention was, however, revived a decade later and its threats
turned into deeds.

In actuality the 1850 compromise was a series of five separate
statutes. These reflected the recommendations of Henry Clay
who, as chairman of a select committee, had embodied them
in an omnibus bill. The omnibus, however, instead of uniting
the friends of the separate provisions, united its enemies and
accordingly failed to pass. It was when Douglas took command
of the legislation, seeing that it might be enacted if, for example,
some northern Senators were not required to vote for a fugitive
slave bill and some Southerners were not required to vote for
the admission of California, that the whole was put through. The
"measures of adjustment" were, then, as follows: the admission
of California as a free state; acts for the establishment of territorial
governments for Utah and New Mexico, which provided that
tibe states to be formed therefrom might enter the Union with
or without slavery, as their constitutions should prescribe; an act
compensating Texas for the abandonment of large territorial
claims in New Mexico and definitely fixing the boundaries be-
tween the two; an act abolishing the slave trade (but not slavery)
in the District of Columbia; and finally an act designed greatly
to improve upon the efficiency of the old fugitive slave law, now
deemed by the South to be wholly inadequate.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, providing two new territorial
governments, repealed the eighth section of the 1820 enabling
act for Missouri, which had prohibited slavery "forever" in the
area for which the new governments were established. This re-
peal rested upon the hypothesis that the Compromise of 1850
had "superseded" that of 1820. Against this hypothesis is the fact
that the bill Douglas introduced in January 1854 was itself a

438 APPENDICES

substitute for the one introduced some weeks earlier by Senator
Dodge of Iowa, who had merely revived the Nebraska bill of
the previous session which had passed the House and failed in
the Senate, apparently only by being lost in the rush of adjourn-
ment business. And this bill had not even alluded to the Missouri
Compromise. Yet in successive amendments to Douglas's bill the
Missouri restriction was declared "inoperative and then "void."
In a famous clause called by Thomas Hart Benton a a stump
speech in the belly of the bill," it was declared to be the true intent
and meaning of Congress neither to legislate slavery into the terri-
tories, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people there
"perfectly free" to form and regulate their own domestic institu-
tions. One obvious difficulty with respect to such a declaration
was that when it was made the "people" to which it referred
did not yet exist except for some few trespassers upon the public
domain since Kansas and Nebraska were not lawfully open to
settlement until after the bill became law. The "people" of Kansas,
where the issue was joined, had yet to come from either free
or slave states and were certain to be either pro-slavery or anti-
slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act legislated civil war on the
plains of Kansas.

The story of "bleeding Kansas" need not be retold here. The
contest between the anti-slavery emigrant-aid societies, equipped
with "Beecher's bibles" i.e., rifles and the "border ruffians" and
Blue Lodges of Missouri was the practical result of introducing
"squatter sovereignty." Both sides employed fraud and violence
freely, but the proximity of Missouri gave the first advantage
to the pro-slavery settlers. Consequently the territorial legislature
elected in March 1855 was pro-slavery and was prepared to use its
obviously temporary advantage to force the issue and make Kan-
sas a slave state before the anti-slavery people could do anything
about it And the anti-slavery settlers, who must have been in
a majority almost immediately after the first elections (if they
were not already so at the time), reacted by boycotting the
"legal" government and setting up one of their own, to be known
in history as the Topeka Movement The contest between the
two "governments" was prosecuted both in Kansas and Washing-
tonbut it was in Washington that the decisive field of action
lay.

Much has been said of the "fraudulent" Lecompton Constitu-
tion in the foregoing pages of this book. We have not hesitated

APPENDICES 439

to use such a pejorative expression, since it represents ground
common to Lincoln and Douglas. Yet the reader should know
somewhat more precisely the nature of this attempted fraud. It
was the direct consequences of that early advantage of the pro-
slavery settlers. Determined, as we have said, to make Kansas
a slave state, the Kansas legislature passed a law over the
governor's veto which provided for a constitutional convention,
which in due course met at Lecompton, Kansas, September 7,
1857. The vote for the delegates to this convention had taken
place the preceding June 15, but the free-state men had refused to
participate in it for the very good reason that the entire electoral
machinery was in the hands of the slave-state men and an honest
vote was impossible. The convention completed its work early
in November, submitting to the voters of the territory the alterna-
tive of adopting their constitution with or without an article
securing the institution of Negro slavery. The fraud, however,
consisted in this: the voters did not have the option of rejecting
the constitution as a whole, and the constitution "without" slavery
did not provide for the emancipation of slaves already in Kansas.
On the contrary, it expressly forbade the future state legislature
to emancipate slaves already in Kansas without their owners'
consent and without full compensation. Further, no amendment
of the state's constitution was to be permitted before 1864 ob-
viously to prevent changes in the status of slavery. There were
only about two hundred slaves in Kansas at the time, but so long
as their slave status, and that of their progeny, was guaranteed
to remain, Kansas must in principle be a slave state, no matter
which way the voters voted. This was the heart of the fraud.
Of course, with the security of even a small number of slaves
assured in law, it might not be possible to distinguish them from
slaves subsequently smuggled in from Missouri. To help assure
that no such distinction would in fact be made, the Lecompton
delegates also provided in their constitution that the provisional
electoral machinery, to go into effect as soon as the state was
admitted into the Union, would be in the hands of the Lecompton
men themselves. They would "supervise" the first elections to the
state legislature.

The Lecompton Constitution was "approved" almost unani-
mously by a vote taken on December 21, 1858. This "approval"
represents both the abstention from the election by the free-staters
and the sifting of the ballot boxes by the pro-slavery election

440 APPENDICES

judges. The constitution was, however, transmitted to Washington,
where the full power of the slave states was lined up behind the
pliant Buchanan, who now showed more determination in a bad
cause than he was ever to show in a good one. Lecompton was ap-
proved in the Senate but was defeated in the House by a vote
of 120 to 112, the victors including 92 Republicans, 22 Douglas
Democrats, and* 6 Know-Nothings. Lecompton, by this fact,
became moribund but not yet quite dead. A compromise was
adopted, bearing the name of Representative English of Indiana,
which provided for it to be again submitted to the voters
of Kansas. Only now it was a vote on outright acceptance, without
evasiveness on the slavery article, or outright rejection. If they
accepted it, Kansas would become a state immediately, receiving
a huge grant of government lands, and with the receipts from the
sale of other government lands promised. If they rejected
Lecompton, the territory must attain a population of 90,000 (the
ratio for a member of the House) before again applying for
statehood. Clearly the English bill bribed Kansans to accept
Lecompton and enter the Union as a slave state (the population
was then no more than 25,000). Yet a clear chance to vote on
the whole Lecompton iniquity was all the free-staters wanted.
With the entire country watching, and fraud at the ballot boxes
now minimized, Lecompton was duly buried on August 2, 1858
by a vote of 11,812 to 1,926. Kansas was now firmly in free-state
hands, notwithstanding the fact that, by the Dred Scott decision
of 1857, slaveowners might, if they chose, still take slaves there.
With the virtual monopoly of the instruments of violence, lawful
and unlawful, now possessed by their enemies, it was unlikely that
any slaveowners would do so.

Appendix II
Some Notes on the Dred Scott Decision

AMONG the attempts to shift all blame for the coming of the Civil
War on the Republicans, especial notice is due to the brilliant
and highly influential essay by Frank Hoddef, "Some Phases of
the Dred Scott Case," published in The Mississippi Valley Histori-
cal Review, Volume XVI, pp. 3-22, June 1929. According to
Hodder, the Supreme Court had originally decided only that the
decision of the highest court of Missouri was final as to the status
of persons within the boundaries of that state. It was not neces-
sary, says Hodder, for the Court to have entered the question of
the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, and it would not
have entered upon it if Justices McLean and Curtis had not
announced their intention to go over this ground in dissenting
opinions. McLean was an active candidate for the Republican
presidential nomination, and so he is the chief villain of Hodder's
scenario, although he blames Curtis even more for supporting
McLean, since Curtis was (according to Hodder) mending fences
in anti-slavery New England, whither he intended soon to retire
to enter upon a money-making legal practice. McLean was then
the ambitious fanatic but Curtis the baser of the two, since he
acted rather from avarice. All such speculations concerning
motives are pure conjecture and tell us more about Hodder than
about the judges. Let us, however, assume that Hodder is correct
and that Justice Nelson's opinion would have been the opinion
of the Court but for McLean and Curtis. Then let us ask whether
a reasonable man who was genuinely concerned, as was Lincoln,
about the nationalization of slavery would have nonetheless ob-
jected (as did McLean and Curtis).

"The opinion of Nelson, which but for the dissent of McLean
and Curtis would have been the opinion of the Court," writes
Hodder, "held that when a slave returns to a slave state his status
is determinable by the courts of that state. That question had
been decided by unanimous opinion of the Court, in 1850, in
the case of Strader v. Graham. The Ordinance of 1787 and the

APPENDICES

Compromise of 1820, whatever their validity, had no extra-
territorial force. Scott was a slave because the Supreme Court of
Missouri had decided that he was a slave. The judgment of the
lower court should therefore be affirmed. This was the only
respectable opinion delivered by the Court. It was not only correct
in law, but it was best for the free states. It relieved them from
any obligation to give effect to the laws of slave states except as
they were bound by the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution."
Now Hodder's assertion that Nelson's opinion was "correct in law"
rests on the hypothesis of both the soundness of the decision in
Strader v. Graham and the identity of the legal questions
involved. How sound the precedent was we may briefly indicate
as follows. Hodder shows that in Nelson's opinion the analogy
worked thus: "As Nelson pointed out, if a proper respect for the
laws of Illinois required Missouri to give effect to them, then a
proper respect for Missouri required that Illinois give effect to
her laws and Scott would not have been free in Illinois." But
this reasoning is patently based upon the assumption of the
equality of free law and slave lawan assumption which Missouri
herself had never made in the eight precedents which the Missouri
Supreme Court overruled in 1852! But, more important for
present purposes, Strader v. Graham was not identical with Dred
Scott v. Sandford. In the earlier case slaves had passed from Ken-
tucky to Ohio, which was a state and not a territory free under
a federal prohibition. The plaintiffs in Strader had claimed that
the Northwest Ordinance had made the land north of the Ohio
River forever free, but the Court rejected this and decided that
the old ordinance had been supplanted by a statute after the
adoption of the Constitution and that the principle of state
equality supplanted the statute after Ohio had become a state.
All that the Court had really decided in the 1850 case was that
the extraterritorial force of Ohio law, after the slaves returned to
Kentucky, was a matter of interstate comity and not a matter of
federal adjudication. But this differs vitally from Dred Scott,
since Scott had been held not only in Illinois, a free state (and,
like Ohio, originally under the Northwest Ordinance), but for
about two years in Wisconsin Territory, in a place where slavery
was prohibited by the Missouri Act of 1820. This involved a
distinct issue as between federal law and state law and differed
from the issue of state law versus state law in the 1850 case.

APPENDICES 443

Hodder's precedent utterly fails him. If Dred Scott had been as-
similated to the Strader case, this would have been to put very
new wine into an older bottle. It might have averted the storm
Taney's decision created in the North, as Hodder in company
with all revisionists dearly wishes. But it might for that reason
have been even more perilous to the anti-slavery cause. Let us
see.

As we have already observed, Hodder admits that when, in
1852, the Supreme Court of Missouri decided against Dred Scott
by a decision of two to one, they "repudiated eight Missouri
precedents in Scott's favor upon the ground that 'times had
changed' and that the free states, by obstructing the return of
fugitive slaves, refused to recognize the law of slave states." Times
had indeed changed, for in times past courts of slave states had
repeatedly honored both the Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri
Compromise. Behind the Missouri Supreme Court's decision, how-
ever, was the whole bitter controversy of 1850. We have demon-
strated above at some length that the Compromise of 1850 was,
in vital respects, no compromise at all, since Congress declared
nothing on the most bitterly controverted of all points (the power
of Congress over slavery in the territories ) but had rather passed
the buck on that question to the Supreme Court of the United
States. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, we have also seen, although re-
pealing the eighth section of the Missouri Act of 1820, still left
open the same question by appearing to give all power over slav-
ery to the territorial legislature but actually giving it all power
"subject ... to the Constitution" and leaving it to the Supreme
Court to decide how much power the Constitution permitted the
territorial legislature to have. Since the territorial legislature de-
rived its powers from Congress, it obviously could have no powers
that Congress lacked, and so the issue of the powers of Congress
and of the territorial legislature was really one and the same.

Now Nelson's opinion was really nothing but a cautious and
surreptitious attempt to accomplish the results of Taney's opinion,
and it is easy to see why McLean and Curtis might have
determined to force the whole thing out into the open. Hodder's
assertion that Nelson was "correct in law" is absurd, unless he is
prepared to maintain, as he does not, that the Missouri Compro-
mise was in fact unconstitutional. Nelson's opinion, no less than
Taney's, had the effect, in Lincoln's words, of deciding that
"whether the holding of a negro in actual slavery in a free State

444 APPENDICES

[or free territory] makes hi free, as against the holder, the
United States Courts will not decide, but will leave to be de-
cided by the courts of any slave State the negro may be forced
into by the master." It is true that Nelson's opinion does not
constitute an open repudiation of the Missouri law. But if we
remember the supremacy clause of the Constitution according
to which valid federal law takes precedence over conflicting state
law we cannot doubt that this was an implied repudiation. Nor
could McLean, who certainly had a more intimate knowledge of
his colleagues' minds than Professor Hodder could possibly have
had, doubt it. If McLean did force the issue, it was because he
knew that the majority on the Court was prepared to strike down
any attempt by either Congress or a territorial legislature to
prohibit slavery in the territories, and he was rightly convinced
that the time had come when the country should know the mean-
ing of the Democratic slave power's strategy in entrusting to the
Supreme Court the mystery of the legal status of slavery in the
territories.

Hodder laments the political character of the opinions of Taney
and McLean and Curtis. But this was inevitable, once Congress
had handed over the greatest political question of American
history to the Court. Ever since the Wilmot Proviso agitation the
slave power had been weakest in the House of Representatives,
strongest in the Senate. As long as weak presidents and strong
southern senators could keep the Supreme Court favorable to the
South, the cards were stacked in favor of the South on the
territorial issue. The only recourse of free-soilers was in a party
which would elect a free-soil President, who would appoint free-
soil judges. That Nelson was, in fact, prepared to denounce the
Missouri Act of 1820 is shown by his subsequent endorsement of
Taney's opinion. McLean must have seen that Nelson and Taney
were playing a party game and playing it to the hilt, as indeed
they were. Anyone who cannot see that today must be blind in-
deed. Professor Hodder finds McLean an ambitious politician, but
Taney acted only from "a mistaken sense of duty" and not from
"any partiality for slavery." Perhaps so; perhaps Taney never in-
tended that the President who was of his party, should soon crow
in a message to Congress, "It has been solemnly adjudged by the
highest judicial tribunal known to our laws that slavery exists in
Kansas by virtue of the Constitution of the United States. Kansas
is therefore as much a slave state as Georgia or South Carolina."

Index

INDEX

Abolition, 74, 75, 97, 199, 201

Douglas on, 42, 51, 75

Lincoln on, 34

Adams, J. Q., 71, 112, 163, 314
Africa, 101, 339, 341
African slave trade, 311
Alabama, 401
Alexander, 265
Aliens. See Foreigners
Alien and Sedition Laws, 97
Alton, 196, 197, 199, 224
Ambition, 204, 205, 219
Aristotle, 190, 214, 216, 217, 219,

251, *53, 260, 331, 342, 343,

344, 346, 354

Articles of Confederation, 284
Ashburton, Lord, 91, 92
Asia, 100, 101, 339
Atchison, David, 146, 147, 148, 149

Baker, Capt. E. D., 246

Barren vs. Baltimore, 292

Easier, 196

Benton, Thomas Hart, 146

Beveridge, Albert J., 20, 198, 219,

246

Bible, 331
Binldey, W. E., 72
Booth, J. W., 184
Brooks, Preston S., 293, 392, 393
Brown, John, 47, 104, 196, 245, 334
Brutus, 184, 215, 217
Buchanan, 277, 278, 292, 387, 391,

403

Bulwer, Sir Henry, 93, 99
Burke, Edmund, 259
Butler, Senator Andrew, 96, 98, 99

Caesar, 210, 214, 215, 217, 225, 265
Calhoun, John C., 49, 50, 62, 65, 98,

116, 163, 314
California, 54, 78, 94, 123, 124, 130,

152, 156, 390
Canada, 92, 407
Caribbean, 99
Cass, Lewis D., 144
Catholics, 73, 75, 197, 198, 246
Catron, Judge, 277
Central America, 94, 95, 99, 100,

101, 408

Chamwood, Lord, 21, 188
Chase, Salmon P., 164, 177, 178,

179, 180, 279, 372, 389
Christians (and Christianity), 178,

262

Church and State, 254
Churchill, Lord Randolph, 33
Churchill, Sir Winston, 45, 187, 369
Civil and religious liberty, 191
Civil War, 27, 105, 201, 275, 361,

386
Clay, Henry, 41, 70, 73, 76, 143,

150, 177, 219, 294, 3i8, 337,

339, 341, 342, 345, 375, 385,

388, 389, 390, 407
Clayton, 93

Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 90-95
Climate, 130

Douglas on effects of, 64, 118
Lincoln on effects of, 36
Webster on effects of, 124
Colombia, 95

Colonization: Clay on, 384, 385
Douglas on, 61

448 INDEX

Jefferson on, 384, 385

Lincoln on, 61, 385
Colorado, 400, 401, 403
Communist, 200
Compromise of 1850, 104, 131, 133-

70. See also Appendix I
Congress, 159

powers of, relative to slavery, 112,
162, 169. See also Appendix I
Connecticut, 245
Conrad, Alfred H., 396, 397
Constitution, 159, 283, 330 ff.
Cooper Union, 202, 203, 284, 394
Costa Rica, 94
Craven, Avery, 364
Crittenden Compromise, 401, 402
Cromwell, 261
Crosskey, William, 291, 292
Cuba, 99
Czar, 98

Dakota, 400, 401, 404

Davis, Jefferson, 125, 159, 292

Declaration of Independence, 79,
369. See also Equality

Deism, 228

Delaware, 294

Democracy: as form of government,
306
as name of party, 73, 219, 313

Disraeli, 83

District of Columbia, 197

Dixon, Archibald, 175, 176, 177, 179

Dixon, Mrs. Archibald, 107, 142, 175

Dodge, Senator, 151

Dred Scott Decision, 104, no, 111,
130, 162, 169, 269, 277, 278,
279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 285,
286, 289, 292, 293, 39 3*
313, 3M, 32i 350, 35 l > 367>
379, 395, 398, 402, 403. See
also Appendix II

Egypt, 220, 221, 226
Equality, 363-66

Fascism, 204

Federalists, 97

Federalist Papers, 204, 230, 231,

237, 238

Fifth Amendment, 289, 290
Fillmore, Millard, 73
First Inaugural, 190
Florida, 69, 401

Foote, Senator, 334

Foreigners, 42, 73, 360

Fourteenth Amendment, 291, 292,
380

Fourth of July, 360

Franklin, Benjamin, 314

Freeport Doctrine: Douglas's opin-
ion, 350, 357
Lincoln's attack upon, 350, 357

Free-Soilers, 129, 138, 155, 157

Fugitive Slave Act, 142, 154, 167,

37

Fugitive Slave Clause of Constitu-
tion. See Appendix I

Galesburg debate, 366
Garrison, W. L., 200
Georgia, 401

Gettysburg Address, 183, 187, 211,
227, 228, 242, 250, 264, 268
Gray's Elegy, 188
Greeks, 343, 344
Greek Revolution, 83
Greely, Horace, 174, 300, 351
Grier, Judge, 277

Hale, Senator, 49, 334

Hamilton, 70, 71, 204, 206, 216,
238, 271, 314

Hammond, 388

Harper's Magazine, Douglas essay in,
356

Hayne, Robert Y., 50

Henry, Patrick, 314

Hemdon, William, 189, 190

Hise, 93

Hitler, 261

Hobbes, 208

Hodder, Frank, 107. See also Ap-
pendix II

Hofstadter, Richard, 187, 189, 364,
365, 366, 370, 371, 373, 374,
378, 38, 388, 389, 391, 400,
401

Holmes vs. Jennison, 291

Honduras, 93

Hooker, General, 190

Human nature, 251

Hungarian Revolution, 84

Illinois, 200, 245, 283, 289, 294, 295

Indiana, 294, 295

Internal improvements, 344

Iowa, 179

Israel, 220, 226

INDEX

449

Jackson, Andrew, 41, 223, 224

Jacobins, 97

Jefferson, 111, 143, 157, 208, 211,
220, 224, 225, 227, 239, 241,
242, 296, 304, 306, 314, 322,
3^3, 325, 326, 334, 358, 383,
384, 385, 399

Jews, 74

Jonas, Abram, 74

Kansas, 36, 104, 179, 180, 276, 283,
297, 299, 300, 301, 302, 387,
408

Kansas-Nebraska Act, 31, 86, 99,
104, 156, 164, 169, 173, 175>
176, 177, 275, 278, 279, 280,
282, 287, 298, 310, 357, 358,
389, 401, 402

Kaskaskia, 119

Kellog, William, 402, 403

Kentucky, 294

Know-Nothings, 42, 47, 73, 74, 245,

359
Kossuth, 84

Labor, free and slave, 393 ff.

Lafayette, 37

Latin America, 102

Law, reverence for, 227 ff.

LeCompton Constitution, 276, 296,
299. See also Appendix I

Lenin, 261

Liberty, civil and religious, 191

Liquor. See Temperance

Locke, John, 75, 314

Louisiana, 358, 401

Louisiana Purchase, 69, 70

Lovejoy, Elijah P., 196, 197, 198,
199> 200

Lovejoy, Owen, 367

Lyceum speech, 184, 185, 191, 197,
199, 203, 208, 210, 220, 224,
225, 226, 232, 235, 244, 245,
265, 306, 322, 328, 341

Lynch, W. (X, 387, 388

Macaulay, Lord, 151, 152
Madison, 204, 238, 271, 284, 314
Maine, 92, 139, 245
Majority rule, 269, 379 ff.
Manifest Destiny, 63, 67, 70, 77, 81,

Qi, 99, 407

Marbury vs. Madison, 285
Marshall, 291

Maryland, 294
Marx, 271

Massachusetts, 200, 245
McConnel, George, 51, 136
Mclntosh, 198
Meyer, John R., 396, 397
Mexican War, 67, 92, 326, 344, 405
Mexico, 78, 95, 99, 124, 130, 159,

344, 389, 391, 407, 408
Michigan, 294

Mill, John Stuart, 32, 35, 101, 340
Milton, George Fort, 20, 41, 52, 64,

148, 364
Minnesota, 180
Mississippi, 193, 401
Missouri, 140, 142, 143, 277, 282,

295
Missouri Compromise, 43, 46, 90, 99,

104, 105, 108, no, 112, 114,

120, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132,

133, 134, 135, 137, 141, 144,

146, 147, 150, 156, 160, 162,

163, 169, 173, 174, 177, 219,
269, 275, 280, 282, 283, 286,
292, 296, 297, 363, 371, 390,
402, 405

Mob rule, 192 ff.
Monroe, 112, 163
Moore, Glover, 140
Mormon, 358
Moses, 220, 221, 230
Mosauito Indians, 93, 94
Myrdal, Gunnar, 373

Napoleon, 265

Nation, idea of the, 333 ff.

Nebraska, 90, 111, 131, 140, 146,

147, 150, 158, 162, 283, 348
Necessity, 370

Negro, 303, 307, 347
Douglas's attitude toward, 32, 33,

34, 35, 339
Lincoln's attitude toward, 32, 33,

34, 35, 320, 369, 376, 385, 386
Jefferson's attitude toward, 325,

384

Nelson, Judge, 282, 283
Nevada, 400, 401, 403
Nevins, Allan, 41, 43, 45, 57, 61, 92,

135, 173, 175, 275, 277, 278,

282, 289, 293, 297
New Mexico, 152, 154, 158, 162,

164, 169, 282, 390, 391
Nicaragua, 93, 94
Nicomachean Ethics, 218, 253, 264

450 INDEX

Northwest Ordinance, 114, 131, 143

282, 285, 294, 295, 296
Northwest Territory, 284

Ohio, 294, 295

Oregon, 122

Otero, 390

Ottawa, 309, 339, 368, 386

People, idea of the, 228

Peoria speech, 305, 311, 338* 367*

375, 376, 382, 389
Pericles, 187
Pierce, Franklin, 90, 91, 148, 150,

277, 278, 291
Pilgrim's Progress, 257
Plato, 346

apology of Socrates, 190
Gorgias, 212, 213, 218
Republic, 228, 319, 344
Political religion, 226 ff.
Politicians, 255, 256
Polk, James K., 67, 91, 93, 151. 34*
Polygamy, 358
Popular sovereignty, 30, 31, 54, 100,

125, i3 6 , !45> *52, 173, 347-

62

Preachers, 254
Providence, 268
Public opinion, 267 ff., 309 ff.

Ramsdell, Charles W., 388, 391, 39*,
393, 395, 396, 397

Randall, James G., 20, 21, 22, 25,
27, ^8, 29, 135, 138, 148, 277,
289, 292, 293, 296, 297, 299,
300, 302, 304, 308, 309, 363,
364, 375, 387, 389, 399, 400,
401, 402, 404

Randolph, John, 295

Ray, P. O., 107

Republican party, 73, 104, 105, 107,
108, 112, 138, 202, 300, 358,
387, 396, 400

Revolution, American, 268

Revolution: moral, 270
right of, 84, 340, 344

Rhode Island, 245

Rhodes, James Ford, 20, 41

Ross, Rev., 337, 341

Rossiter, Clinton, 232

Rousseau, 259, 260

Russia, 69, 74, 79, 86, 88, 91

St. Louis, 193, 194

Scott, Winfield, 72

Second Inaugural Address, 190, 228

Seward, William H., 82, 109, 142,

389

Shakespeare, 216, 261, 264
Shay's Rebellion, 204
Slave-dealers, 312
Slavery, 41-62, 97

Clay on, 41

Douglas on, 44, 47, 48, 53, 54,
116

Lincoln on, 43, 54

Webster on, 79
South America, 408
South Carolina, 401
Spain, 344
Speed, Joshua F., 73
Spinoza, 251
Squatter sovereignty. See Popular

sovereignty
Stamp Act, 98
Stampp, Kenneth, 394, 395
Stone, Dan, 197, 198
Sub-Treasury Speech, 207, 216
Sumner, Senator, 164, 177, 178, 179,
180, 380

Taney, 162, 277, 278, 281, 282, 284,
285, 289, 290, 293, 310, 313,

3i5, 317, 327
Taylor, Zachary, 142
Temperance, 185, 244, 245, 246, 247
Texas, 46, 67, 68, 69, 76, 77, 96, 99,

111, 112, 113, 142, 156, 162,

401, 402

Thirteenth Amendment, 98
Thomas Aquinas, 75
Thompson, Jacob, 292
Tocqueville, 79, 144
Toleration Act, 151, 152, 154

Union, 51, 330 ff.

Utah, 142, 152, 154* 158, 164, 168,
169, 281, 358

Valley Forge, 221
Van Buren, Martin, 72
Venezuela, 95
Vermont, 245
Virginia, 294

Washington, George, 36, 143, 208,
219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 238,
239, 284, 314, 334

INDEX

451

Washingtonians, 246, 251, 253, 255,
259, 262, 263, 266, 267

Webster, Daniel, 52, 55, 67, 68, 69,
79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 93. 100,
124, 150, 155, 156, 187, 344,
388, 389, 390, 391

West India Islands, 408

Whig party, 71, 72, 76, 77, 9*, 93,
96, 100, 124, 150, 154, 179,
184, 185, 192, 219, 223, 286

Wilmot Proviso, 123, 124, 125, 126,
128, 130, 131, 136, 138, 142*

152, 153, 160, 176, 179,
390. See also Appendix I

Williams, Harry T., 38

Wilson, Edmund, 138, 211, 213,
214, 215, 224

Wilson, Woodrow, 190, 191, 219,

365
Wisconsin, 294

Yalta, 90

Yazoo Fraud, 276

3 3

136253

II